What Next?

Having retired, I faced, for the first time in my adult life, a seemingly vast expanse of open time. No longer did I have a place to be at a certain time, or any specific tasks to complete. It was all available to do with as I chose. An exciting prospect, but a little scary. My first choice was to take the entire summer as an extended vacation, let myself do just what I wanted, sleep in as long as I wanted, detox from my worklife.

Two things stand out for me from the summer of 2008 - 1) finding a new trainer to go to for strength training, and 2) taking almost daily bike rides around the island with my husband. I this entry, I want to consider the training aspect.

When I mentioned I didn't think I was making much progress, fitness-wise, I was lucky to get a referral from a friend. She recommended Susan Armiak of Tip Top Physique. Soon I was slotted into a group that met Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8:00 to 9:00am.

Maybe that seems fairly ho-hum to you, but for me it is really something extraordinary. You see, my inner dialogue my whole life has been along the lines of -- "We're not athletic. We're not sports people. We're not outdoors people." (Also in there, by the way, is a whisper "We're not good at theater.") It's really hard to fight those little voices, no matter how smart you are. The fact that it is a lot easier to be inactive doesn't help. Plus all the other demands on my life - job, husband, child, commute, house, church. And so on and so forth, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

Susie started me out easy, I think. She would say that she started me at a level that was appropriate to my fitness level at the time. I remember one exercise she had me doing that involved lying on the floor with my feet hanging on to the punching bag. From that position, I had to sit up and touch the punching bag with my fingertips. In theory, I would be doing 3 sets of 10 reps. In reality, I could barely get all the way up and touch more than two times, and utterly failed to get to 10 partial sit-ups in one set. 3 sets? Fageddaboudit! My push-ups were from my knees and somewhat shallow. If I managed 5, that was good. You get my drift.

It took less time than I expected to see improvement. By the end of the summer, I was doing the full sets of sit-ups and was doing much better with the push-ups. Other things seemed to get easier as well. Unfortunately -- or fortunately, depending on how you see these things -- none of us are allowed to rest on our laurels. Once we can do one thing, we are challenged to do something more difficult. No one ever gets "there" because there actually is no "there." Kind of like what the bear saw when he went over the mountain! There is always an improvement that can be made.

An added bonus in this training experience has been the camaraderie of our small group. Sometimes it is a question of misery liking company. It is energizing, though, to be among people who have the same general goal in mind - in this case, the goal of maintaining and improving our overall fitness. We can encourage each other and commiserate over the difficulties. There are times when the upper arm work has been intense enough to make washing my hair a challenge for the next few days. We laugh about these things at our "afterglows" at Starbucks. Shared pain is a powerful binder. Okay, it's not damaging pain. It's a discomfort, a burn that says, "these muscles under construction."

As my strength has improved, those little inner voices became much less relevant. They don't know jack! I am sure that there are limits to what I can actually do, but I am not sure what those limits are. They are most certainly not as restricted as I used to think.

Now what?

[Check back later for "Now What? -- Part Deux" and thoughts on the joys of cycling.]