A nap, what a wonderful thing, what a lovely bit of self care. Lately, by which I mean anytime in the last year or so, my days are so rammed full of things that there has been no time to just relax a moment, to take a breath. For better or worse, I have felt like taking a break would be bad, would be taking a step back and losing the progress I’ve made. Taking a real break is just that, a break. Recovery and pacing are, as any successful athlete would tell you, critical to long term progress. There should be no shame in a well-earned break, quite the opposite. By its nature, a nap feels best when it is earned. Today’s nap was earned I think, but more than that it was a bit of a warning signal. Because I have been scared of taking a break lately for fear of losing all progress (see also this 240225 - Reflection on a Journey (I)), often I have found myself trying to Goggins myself - thoughts of a break have been hit squarely in the face by overtraining or sleeping too little, pushing myself hard. Today was one of those days where there just wasn’t much left in the tank. Mind you, I could have kept going, but taking the nap will, I think, do much more for me than a second gym session, even if this approach can feel scary to me. Scary, because it means trusting that future me will still remain committed to working hard. By overtraining/working now, I kind of try to buy myself time against the (in my mind) eventual failure of my resolve. ‘Having a chill one’ has seemed perfectly reasonable for all of my friends, yet entirely inappropriate for me. Hasn’t happened in a long time, though, so maybe I ought to reconsider - maybe I get to see myself as an achieving person who deserves an adequate amount of rest, that there is no weakness in self-care. A thought I had recently was this: This year, a lot of focus for me has gone into becoming fitter, building muscle and cardiovascular strength - to be a better physical version of myself. In this endeavour, as in many others, my approach has been t follow my instinct, to do what I ‘want’ to do, regardless of whether it is right or wrong. I scoff at people who follow strict workout plans… ‘Those fools’, I say to myself. ‘Why do they need plans, can’t they just train tough?’. For some reason, in my head planning and doing something the smart way has been a bad idea physically. No, for some reason my brain thinks that only a workout that pushes me to my limit can be good. NO pacing sessions on the ERG, no steady msuscle group training. Just pick up really heavy things, and put down 2k times solidly in the HR max zone - why would you ever need to do Zone 2 pacing?. I know, deep down, that efficient training would be better, lead to faster and more consistent results. But if I followed a plan, I could fail. That’s where my head is at. To pursue a goal in a systematic way means being able to see my progress, to potentially fail. If I never admit to myself that I am after a goal, then I never let myself down, never fail. Yet doing so deprives me of the chance to feel proud, to feel like I am accomplishing things. One goal: I would like to write more, to show my writings to people. To be less afraid of putting myself out there, to trust that I will do my best.
Published on April 9, 2023