Let me be your object lesson

I was a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ed in my per­for­mance at Run to the Far Side 10K today. I had a lot of fun, it was a love­ly day, but I did­n’t quite com­plete the course as fast as I want­ed. I was hop­ing to com­plete in 7:30/mile, and instead came out over 8:10/mile. Not bad, cer­tain­ly not enough to ruin a love­ly morn­ing, but a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ed in the numbers.

So I got home and decid­ed to do a lit­tle work with the dumb­bells, I don’t know why real­ly, just to get a lit­tle more work in before my show­er. As I did dumb­bell press­es over and over, I fell to think­ing about some­one I’m pret­ty angry with. With­out real­ly think­ing about it, I pret­ty much fell into a pat­tern of mur­der­ous fan­ta­sy inter­spersed with more and more sets of curls and shoul­der presses.

And I kept on going and going and going, the sets get­ting more intense and the fan­tasies get­ting more detailed. I pret­ty much had myself whipped up into full-blown rage and I was look­ing for­ward to try­ing to break this per­son in half when I com­plet­ed a set of curls pre­ma­ture­ly with a pop as my upper back gave out on me.

Now I can bare­ly stand up straight and I don’t even know why I was so mad at this per­son. So yeah, maybe the “cathar­sis method” did what it’s sup­posed to and I worked all the rage out of my sys­tem. Maybe. More like­ly is that I just had a mir­ror put in my face about how self-destruc­tive rage is.

Either way, I’m glad that I’m not think­ing hate­ful thoughts any­more, but OW OW OW would­n’t it be nice if life’s lessons could be a lit­tle less painful?

Real A Lie—Auf Der Maur