This Broken Wing...

Did last week kick anyone elses tushie?

Just wondering.

Wondering if this week is going to be like last week? It's scaring me a bit to even consider it, so maybe I'll just try to put some disjointed thoughts together instead...ignoring that I feel utterly battered.

When I woke up this morning, I wasn't finding it too easy to get out of bed...which was odd because I didn't do a thing yesterday. Just lazed around and attempted to catch up with the self that I saw often in passing during the chaos that was last week. Last night while tossing and turning, I dreamed I had already gone to the gym, so it was with great reluctance that I drug my actual self out of bed this morning and got in the car to go to the gym...to do the actual working out instead of the just dreaming about it. I had a thought that it would be just as easy to drive myself to The Dinner Bell and have breakfast as it would for me to drive to the gym. If I actually liked breakfast food, I may have done just that...but...

But, there's this voice in my head that acts as a cheerleader and it usually kicks in on the days that I go to the gym (which incidentally is most days) The voice is still working to get me going (sometimes using guilt as a motivator) but I'm finding myself dragging a bit more and more sometimes. It's not that I don't see results with the working out, but it's just that it appears to be going slower than I want, and I'm feeling discouraged. This is why I stopped stepping on the scale at the gym...I don't think that the mini heart attacks I experience when I step up on the scale pad go well with trying to be healthy (call me crazy, but it seems so counterproductive to have a panic attack and then try to lift weights...smiling your way through your work-out like nothings wrong...it's just easier to not get on the scale and hope that what I'm doing on a mostly daily basis is working) and I know supposedly muscles weigh more...but that's a whole lot of blah blah blah when you hear it come out of someone else's mouth because you know you're dragging your butt to the gym sometimes 6 days a week. I'm still showing up and doing all the sweating though...as my mother said this weekend:

"You have to keep going because you never know..."

"What? When I'll die?"

"No...when it will all kick in!"

My mother used to lift a lot of weights, so she knows what she's talking about... I hope it kicks in soon. Although, I don't want to mislead you because there has been a lot of little changes (and even though I wasn't as thin as I was last Girls Weekend Out, this was the first time I can remember not wincing when I looked in the mirror in the dressing room, because as least I'm shaping up...and I perceive myself as teeny bit more tone) I suppose I'm just remembering the body I had in my early 20's and wondering how the heck I find that again...surely she's in there somewhere?

Come out, come out, wherever you are...

As it was...this morning I found myself stepping up on the cross-training machine and looking around the room. This is usually what one does when working their body in place for a half hour facing a huge bank of mirrors...everyone working our bodies as hard and fast as we can as if we're moving forward, but totally stuck on these machines and seemingly going around in circles instead, staying in the same place, yet racking up the miles, burning through the calories (listening to mostly the same tunes on my iPod and feeling slightly bored with my music, wondering again, if I could watch my episodes of Sex In The City instead and still keep up the pace that I do with the music pumping in my ear?) I often find myself looking around, but try not to stare at anyone for any length of time because I don't want to seem rude (I also try not to stare at myself in the mirror in front of me) And it's mostly the same group that's there every day, and often I find myself making up little stories about my fellow exercisers to keep my interest...

Yet, sometimes it seems so futile to be working this hard and not getting anywhere fast...just getting there more tired and sweaty instead...day after day finding yourself doing mostly the same things over and over in the same place at the same time with the same people seems a little surreal, evidenced by the fact that one of my friends walked into the gym today, walked over to the cross training machine and put her hand on my arm, leaned in and gently said:

"...this place is the Twilight Zone..."

Oh yes.

It is.