My trainer's moving back to his home town just before Christmas, to take care of his little brother while his Mum's sick. I think she has some kind of degenerative disease, so it's serious stuff, and he's helping pay for his Mum's mortgage at the same time as stepping in for his sibling. I thought about jumping ship back to the trainer that I started off with, but seeing as I was at the point where I was doing my own weights workout at the gym by myself, maintaining progress on my running skills, and basically relying on my trainer for that added push and extra motivation when I'm at a low point... I decided to bite the bullet and go it alone.
I figure that if I'm stuck in the bush somewhere and wondering what Brian Boitano would do, I'll have to find a way out of it myself. If I do make it through boot camp to the point where I'm hanging on with all my might to get through the graduation requirements, no one else is going to be there to help me. It might be the memories of my trainer yelling at me to not give in, to believe that I am capable, that there's nothing to it but to do it, but it's ultimately going to be all up to me. So if I don't learn to push myself to my limits, by continuing to see a trainer I would only learn how to let someone else push me to do so. I bet there'll be plenty of that in the Air Force to come, anyway.
Even though I came to the realisation that a lot of this whole get-fit-to-fly journey has been me going solo, it's kind of sad not training with anyone any more. I was telling a friend of mine a couple weeks ago that I was spending more of my waking hours at the gym or training outdoors than actually at home, and that my trainer probably knew more about what was going on in my life than any of my other friends or family. The extent of social sport that I experience is playing tennis and golf on the Wii... the rest of the time that I'm clocking up on fitness is pretty much spent alone, or with relative strangers.
It's strange comparing the past couple months to the year or so that I spent trying to focus on losing weight. I guess I didn't really feel like the goal of getting to the skies was actually possible without achieving a respectable BMI and level of fitness. Despite the awesome support of weekly meetings and sharing thoughts and feelings with people of parallel paths, I never actually made it as far as I've come now... and I haven't been to a meeting since before I started personal training. I guess what I've done is quite similar to the other times in my life that I've lost a chunk of weight without focusing ridiculously on doing so; I've made my focus on getting fit and the weight has just come off as a consequence.
I'm feeling a lot better than I did compared to when I made the previous post exactly a month ago. I've got a few seconds to knock off my 2.4km run time, and now that I'm doing outdoor runs I'm a lot more confident about making it in 13 minutes without dropping by the end of it. I'll probably need a heart rate monitor and/or stopwatch to check on my pace, but just huffing and puffing in the sunshine is a vast improvement compared to thunking away on a treadmill. I tried doing interval runs in boots a couple of weeks ago, but I think my boots are still trying to break me in. Need to shop for uber socks before I try that again. I'll be ecstatic if I manage to do the 2.4km in 13 minutes whilst wearing boots!
I'm on the verge of getting a decent book about training for running, despite feeling completely dorky for wanting to read up on something so seemingly simple to do. I picked up the Elite Forces Manual of Mental and Physical Endurance, which makes for interesting reading, despite inducing hardcore 'someday that's gonna be me!' thoughts. I'm not quite up to SAS standards of fitness, sadly, considering day one of a sample running program in the book is 3km... the Tan is 3.827km(!) and I still can't run it all without slowing or stopping in parts.
Thankfully I'm over my hatred of bikes. I think after realising that proper seat/handlebar adjustment is key to enjoyment of spin classes, and that even the hardest bike workout at the gym is never as bad as how a hardcore run feels, I'm okay with it. If I had money to spare and more time to commute, I'd think seriously about getting a real bike and going bush... but that would just be procrastinating over developing my running legs, I think. I'm not sure how safe I'd be running through proper forests and stuff (I used to think that runners in forests were mad not to just take it easy and enjoy the scenery), but I'd love to work up to that point some day.
I haven't even made it to a gym with a pool this year, to find out if I can remember how to swim. I know that swimming is meant to be awesome cardio and all-over body workout, but I picked the Air Force over the Navy for a good reason. Water and I have never really got along too well... I used to contend that it's because I'm an Aries at heart, but there's meant to be a bit of Pisces in me too! I must admit that I tried snorkelling for the first time this year and loved the feeling of gliding through the water with flippers on, not worrying about how to breathe properly underwater. It was like having one of those unpanicked dreams where you're clearly under the sea, breathing magically, without a care about how or why you're able to exist there when normally it'd be a struggle or at least require some kind of apparatus.
If I don't get enlisted within a few months, I think I could almost be a candidate for a Triathlon! Or maybe a charity fun run, more like. I keep hearing ads on the radio to do courses in personal training, and just the other day someone said to me if all else fails I could probably end up being a fitness instructor. I guess it's weird throwing myself into this whole fitness game for the sake of a career that's probably going to end up making me gain a heap of weight from all the cooking and eating involved. Maybe one could see it as a waste of application, all my fitness knowledge and skills going out the window in a few years to be replaced by whatever the consequences of making pudding from scratch could be. We'll see.
No comments:
Post a Comment