It’s been a bad day. I thought I might be back on the mats in the next week or two. It appears I was mistaken. I had intended to regale you with my antics at a mountain resort this past weekend (remarkable for my willingness to rise at the inconceivably early hour of 9am, and typical for my running afoul of some authority figures attempting to enforce some inane dictum that required me to deftly circumvent the highly permeable perimeter of a saloon), but I’m having trouble scraping together the energy to brush my teeth (and I own an electric toothbrush), let alone perform the necessary trek to a local medical facility.
Every single element of my neurochemical substrate is screaming at me to surrender to noxious despair and bow my head in defeat. My highest ambition for the day, ostensibly, is to roll over to the other side of the bed. My muscles ache, I have no desire to eat, my brain hurts… in short, I feel like a bag of hammered shit. If the majority of the components of my body had their way, all I would be capable of right now is a plaintive, exasperated exclamation of ‘motherfucker!’, directed at the vagaries of an indifferent universe.
But I am not my body. I am not my muscles. Or my heart. Or even the majority of my brain, laying, as it does, outside my conscious control. My muscles don’t want to move… too bad. My heart desires a leisurely afternoon… tough shit. The elements of my brain that control nine-tenths of the mechanism of motivation want to eat ice cream… up yours you lazy piece of gray matter. About an hour ago I was laying on the floor, gasping desperately for air, while an acrid, coppery taste, emerging from my lungs, seared the back of my throat. My muscles throbbed, enervated by the miserable tide of lactic acid, and my heart was thumping in agony as it descended mercifully, finally, from the lofty pace of over 170 bpm. The automatic, ignominious saboteur that resides in my skull, which had been begging for my autonomous, conscious mind to relent, was finally placated by my recumbence.
I had just obliterated my previous best time in the hundred burpee challenge by as near as makes no difference 30 seconds. I was able to do that because I can ignore the internal wellsprings of doubt that conspire to reduce us to victims of biology and circumstance. I was able to do that because I am my choices, and I chose penance for even considering offering less than my best today.
The Ballad of Clint Thrust 