My Journey With Health And Fitness – Working At My Own Pace

My Dad had another saying, no matter how bad things are for you someone else has it worse. It is a saying that I like to think I have always taken to heart. Lately I seem to have lost sight of that as I continue to struggle with my own grief but it was brought home to me a few days ago. I was out walking and ran into a longtime friend who was at a local restaurant having lunch on the patio. I stopped and we chatted and then she got a bit weepy as she apologized for missing my brother’s celebration of life but she had COVID. She proceeded to tell how bad her husband had it and that now he is trying to build up his strength again so that he can go back east in September to spread his mother’s ashes. I asked when she had passed and was told the beginning of April. This is when my heart stopped and I thought of my Dad’s saying. You see this friend lost her mother back in January, a few weeks later their adult son died suddenly and then about a month after that her husband lost his mother, all of this in a little over 3 months. As she said, this is a shitty year.

It was Powerhour at the fitness centre this morning. The instructor is awesome and I find her, like the other instructors, to be very encouraging. She is always encouraging us to go faster or squat down farther or you can do more than you think. I kind of agree with her but really, I always go at the best pace I can pushing myself as hard as possible.

We started this morning with Thunderstruck which involves intervals of fast feet and burpees. Fast feet is where you take fast, little steps standing in one spot. Now I do these fast feet at the best pace I can so that I can maintain the pace throughout the entire exercise and I know I work hard. I do see some of the other women doing it fairly slowly and not pumping it up until near the end when the instructor is saying to go faster. I’m not criticizing them for doing it this way it is just for me I need to finish as strong as I started.

The squats and lunges are different for me. The calls from the instructor are always to try and go deeper, which I understand. However, my squats and lunges are fully dependent on the mood of my cranky knee. On a good day I can bend my knee 110 degrees, on a bad day it is 90 degrees and sometimes I have absolutely no control over what amount of flexibility I am going to get. Today it was closer to the 90 degrees because I once again stupidly did split squats yesterday (you put 1 foot behind you on a bench and squat with the other leg) which I know the cranky knee hates.

But here is what I remind myself, when I first started on this journey I walked at a much slower pace and was often embarrassed when even seniors passed me. You know what? I walk faster now but walking at that slower pace still helped me to lose an awful lot of weight. It is the same with running (which I so want to get back to) in that yes, still a slow runner but guess what? my consistent endurance was pretty impressive.

So go at your own pace as long as you are pushing yourself to do your best. All you can ask from yourself is that you giving it your all.