After a Bad Day at the Gym

Two weeks ago I woke up at 5:15 in the morning and drove my sleepy ass to the gym to get my workout in before I go to work. I had six hours sleep the night before, but it felt like half that.

I did a few brief exercises and warmups before doing the overhead press. I finished one set, and got ready to do my second. The barbell didn't move from my shoulders. My arms just seized up and just said, "LOL, nope!"

I left the gym disappointed in my failure. I kept trying to reassure myself, saying that we all have bad days at the gym, and it's not a big deal. It didn't work. I was pissed.

About an hour into my shift at work I became so frustrated that I just wondered if I should give up completely. "What's the point of all this? I'm going to have to do this as long as I live. Why not just quit, get fat again, and die?"

I hate that being in good shape takes so much work. It's even more frustrating when I have to constantly stop training because of an injury. Months of hard work gets pissed down the drain while I recover. Since having bariatric surgery, I've had injured knees, an injured shoulder, and an injured abdomen. My shoulder still has calcium deposits on it, and I have to lift through the pain.

Meal prep is a pain in the ass, too. It takes hours out of my day to cook them (one day a week, but a long day nonetheless), and constantly looking for recipes that both meet my macro requirements and taste good is a chore. It would be so much easier to just go to Wendy's and order a giant burger and fries.

For the first time in human history, we have to work to not get fat, as opposed to work to not starve, and our bodies haven't yet evolved to deal with that reality. It sucks.

It would be so much easier to quit.

While I was contemplating all of that, I asked myself why I've been at it for so long in the first place. It's been nearly three years since I had the surgery, and I've been working my ass off to get stronger, faster, and better ever since. I remembered this quote from The Oatmeal:

"I often regard overeating as a drug addiction, and I try to imagine what my life would be like if that addiction got the best of me. I picture the years wearing on, with Earth's annual trip around the sun being marked by an increase in pant sizes and a decrease in self worth. I imagine my heart getting tighter and more flustered, until one sunny morning it shudders to a violent halt. I imagine myself wrenching forward, my face heaving into a pile of waffles. I imagine my last breath gurgling into a tepid pool of maple syrup.
I imagine all these things, and I think: 

I don't want to die face first in a pile of waffles. 

I want to die in an electrical storm.
I want to die wrestling a Kodiak bear.
I want to die in an EXPLOSION.
I want to die quietly at home, hand in hand with somebody who loved me. 

I just don't want to die by waffles. Anything but waffles."

Anything but waffles. That's why I keep doing it.

The other reason is the thing that I've long realized since I was a child:

People are coming to hurt you, and nobody is coming to help you. Get training, motherfucker.

 If the desire to not die by waffles isn't enough, the need to be able to defend myself is.

Fuck it. Let's hit the gym!