what is a workout?

When a workout begins – a benign feeling of nothingness is about, a sense of what may or may not be. Why am I here enters in?…what will I do fleshes out into the mind. You move your bones around – picking up your physical pieces – only to find, no one is there to help you move, but you. You sink into your eyes, gathering your breath from nowhere it seems. The air rushes in, yet you’ve never seen, air. It begins to fuel your lungs, something you yet have never seen as well. Although – you sense those capsules of hope keep you alive.

You wonder to yourself, “my heart is beating, but will it ever stop?” You drudge on – forgetting what you just felt as you slap on the weights, hearing them alarm your senses to a more than wakened state. You feel your skin skim along the cold iron – only knowing you’ve been there before, but haven’t been, today. So, you plunge into another workout, what number would this be, you wonder? Who cares – just lift the weight you say to yourself, as you take another breath. You feel your tongue flex as you inhale – your chest swell up with the incoming air – now tensing your grip around the cold bar – feeling your blood just below your skin, tempt to warm up the bar – but failing. You squeeze now – your knuckles go white, your fingertips plunge yet harder against the cold metal – and you hoist up the weight – feeling your joints rattle and twine around as you move and thrust it up!

Then, a moment later – you feel a surge of power, enter into your arms, the blood now moving faster as you heat, your veins filling full, your heart skips into a higher beat load and all at once, you grind out a rep, a second rep, another one and then another – until you peak and find yourself reeling emotionally with a sense of more than humanness to yourself, but only for a moment – the world eases away leaving you alone in yourself, feeling just one simple sensory connection. You then heave the weight one last and final rep, groaning and wanting to yell out – so you do, as is permissible you feel and finally, finally you bring the weight down, resting back on the lifeless holds that stabilize the poundage. You rest. You recover, only to convince yourself again that you are able to go again – to go again you say to yourself – to go again I must - you must - you say to yourself, to go! You feel the latent pump in your arms, your shoulders your chest and feel energized as if plugged in to a bio-pool of energy you cannot see, supercharging you up – easier than before you admit is should be? You go – grabbing the bar, throwing all caution away – and you hoist, lift and grapple the weight upwards again – only this time you have been there before – just moments ago – the bar is your close friend now, not a stranger as it was when you arrived, the memory is close, the relationship is strong – the tonnage moves effortlessly now – as if made of balsawood. You sit, fully pumped and realize that you have done it, you’ve just moved an object that cannot move – yet you did – it is done, it is over, for today.

Written by : Coach Dan, December 2005