Busting Mine to Kick Yours

Cause sometimes you feel tired,
feel weak, and when you feel weak, you feel like you wanna just give up.
But you gotta search within you, you gotta find that inner strength
and just pull that shit out of you and get that motivation to not give up
and not be a quitter, no matter how bad you wanna just fall flat on your face and collapse.
Eminem f. Nate Dogg ('Til I Collapse)

So today I took an APFT -- bright and early at 5am (which is early even for the Army...like most people we prefer to do things when the sun is actually up). For those of you not lucky enough to wear a uniform to work, the APFT is the Army Physical Fitness Test -- 2 minutes of pushups, 2 minutes of situps and a 2-mile run. Each event is graded on a 100-point scale, with standards changing for males and females of different age groups. I got a 300 -- 50 pushups, 89 situps and a 14:09 on the two-miler. One thing I love about the Army is that your worth as a soldier is judged almost entirely on your ability to peform on this bi-annual test of physical chutzpah. You could be the most technically proficient soldier on the planet -- THE smartest guy on xyz, but if you fuck up this test, you're automatically seen a shitbag. On the other hand, if you're only an average soldier in terms of your ability to do your job, but you're a PT STUD, well...you're pretty much golden. Kicking ass on the PT test is the only thing I have left out here that resembles an athletic competition.

I miss being an athlete. I miss rowing in particular -- I remember what it's like to walk out onto a wooden dock with a shell resting on my shoulder, I remember the feeling of sliding back and forth on my seat, my oar cutting through the water, the clean economy of movement that makes up each stroke...I remember how the river smells early in the morning, and I miss it. There's nothing like the pride you feel after getting off the erg and realizing you just got your personal best, there's nothing in the entire WORLD that can compare to being a god for 6 minutes on the water. The callouses and blisters that turned your hands into raw meat, and the slide-bites that covered your calves and made it impossible to feel pretty in a dress during the Spring season...the aches that forced you to go through tubes of icy-hot, the missed sleep, the banged fingers, crying walking up stairs, tendonitis, weekends spent chasing medals instead of boys...it was all worth it, just for that 6 minutes when nothing could touch you, when it was just you and seven others tearing your hearts out, chasing glory.

I think that's why I love working out. I'm trying to recapture what I've been missing since Sophomore year of college. It's not that I want to look like a Cosmo cover girl, like the cardio bunnies that make it impossible to get on the stair stepper at 5 in the afternoon -- I'm in search of strength, I'm hunting down my endurance, I'm pushing as far as I can as hard as I can, until I collapse. I want to bench my bodyweight, I want to squat 300 pounds, I want to run 2 miles in sub-13, I want to compete in a marathon and I want to feel that pride...I'm tearing my heart out, chasing glory. I want that stretch of time when nothing can touch me, when the whole world shrinks to my lungs, my heart, my legs, the blood in my ears and the rush that carries me as far as I can possibly go...when I can be a god again, even if it's only for a minute or two.

Who wouldn't want that?