No pain, No gain

For those of you asking how my training session went..well, it went well! I am extremely sore today, but as some of you know, I live by the saying, "No pain, no gain." I first heard this saying in middle school from a field hockey coach. You KNEW the first week of field hockey, field hockey camp, that you were going to be SORE. You pretty much just went to practice, ate a whole ton of food when you got home and crashed. (as a teenager to crash at say 7-8pm..you knew you were working hard!) I've learned to embrace that saying, and try to really live that these days. I KNOW when I push myself I will undoubtedly get sore. I'm sure that some of you will find this crazy and others of you will totally get my "warped sense of thinking" but I LOVE the soreness! It's like a little reward from my hard work. I say reward meaning, I KNOW that I just kicked my own butt and yeah..that muscle there..and OH that one there, and OMG that one there....yeah they WORKED!! What do I gain from knowing that my muscles are sore? A sense of accomplishment, a sense of pride, a sense of happiness. You see, the things I'm doing these days are things that I NEVER would have imagined myself doing, even a year ago from today.

Concrete blocks, truck tires, tractor tires and my rock Buster (bust-her) are things I am training with these days. In looking up some info on the weight of tractor tires, they are estimated to weigh between 400-600lbs....I don't doubt that this one weighs any less. The average weight of a regular tire seems to be around 22 pounds. Yesterday the training I did started with a regular tire and ended with the above bad boy. Jason, the trainer, had us run quite a bit to get warmed up. (not nearly the distance that I normally run, but was pushing myself to run harder than normal as I am a slow runner). We started off doing 30 sec of step ups followed by 30 sec of push-ups hands on the tire...5 sec break and repeat. We did squats, picked up the tire, threw it out in front of us and did walking squats up to tire and threw again. We did hand over hand planking around the tires. We jumped in the tire and out, followed by kicking back to plank and back up again. Mountain climbers, forward lunges with tires on our shoulders, clean and jerks with tire and then came burpees!! 10 burpees, ran a short distance did 9 burpees, back to do 8 and so on down to 1. (that's a total of 55 burpees with runs in between, for those of you wondering). I can't say I did spectacular the whole time..but I pushed myself and tried my best. After our training session my friend Colleen and I went to tackle the tractor tire. It takes two of us to lift it. We did 10 flips down her yard and 10 flips back up. At this point I was hurting, but I always have a craving for MORE once my body feels like it's pumped up. I left and went to my parents house just down the road and did a slow, flat 2 mile run. I like doing my runs once in a while without my music. It gives me time to reflect on things and let my mind wander. My mind was wandering thinking about how freaking cool it was that I was just able to do that work-out, flip the tire and now I was running...2 miles...a distance I couldn't even begin to do a year ago! After I did all this I still ended up going for a hike with my sister later in the day...a fairly challenging hike, (lots of hills) and think probably ended up being about 3 miles.

I'm feeling really good about things again these last 2 weeks. I've started eating better again, cranked up a few notches on my training and the combo of not having junk in my diet and the natural "high" you get from working out have made me be on cloud 9. Life is just so great right now. My beast mode is officially set to on! Once I get back in the habit of working out fairly hard every day, I start to crave those work-outs more and more! Every inch of me hurts today. I did manage to make it out to the park with my nephew and sis and did some climbing around on playground equipment. I'm loving being sore right now.....I can only imagine how sore I will be after my Spartan race. I am SO looking forward to it!! No pain, no gain...and the gain I'm getting is one of health, happiness and accomplishment.