A frustrating day yesterday - no run in the afternoon and a few less yards in the morning swim workout than I would have liked. I started to whine to myself the old 'I s*ck and it's hot and I'll never get back into the shape I was before I broke my arm a year ago and my achilles hurts and so on and so on and on and on...' mantra. Yeah, the kind of stuff I usually hate to hear from the folks I train. I hate it even more when I'm the one doing the whining, because it's more difficult to place a silver lining on your own dark cloud.
However, since the achilles was sore, it was probably a good thing I took the afternoon off. It wasn't like I did absolutely nothing but lay around and drink beer. I did wrestle with a boatload of pharmacy school notes, books, multimedia, entertainment center items, tables, washer/dryer, etc., belonging to Jason and Laura. It was hot. It took three hours to shove it all into a U-Haul. And it definitely s*cked to be Jason; the dude had to drive the stuff back to Tennessee in a day. I definitely felt for him much more than I did for me. I offered him the opportunity to shower and change into some dry clothes before he took off; I was completely soaked and miserable, so I knew he had to be close to that point. Days like yesterday are good every once in a while. It makes you think long and hard about the silliness of moving all your household belongings in the middle of summer. It reminded me just how good it is to have a couple of college degrees and some ostensibly-marketable skills. It reminded me how good it is to have a choice to work in a location where air conditioning works fifty percent of the time (the main office in Norfolk has worse a/c problems than we do). And it reminded me just how good it is to be able to do this as part of my (nearly) everyday routine. Chuckie "V" had this to say this morning:
I propose that if we were all born without worries of survival (financial and emotional stability and such) and all we had to do all day---indeed, wanted to do all day---was train, only then might we start to reach our athletic potential. Potential is impossible to measure, of course. When I lived at the Olympic Training Center, the physiologists tried to measure it through a nonstop series of tests: VO2 max, muscle biopsies, and the like. But yet we know that such tests don't really do the trick. No numbers can. Heart-rate monitors cannot measure heart. Power meters cannot measure will power. Potential is what you make of it. You're close when you believe you are.
Chuckie was inspired by something Kevin wrote, and in turn has inspired me. So I'm going to steal from Chuckie's blog today, in the hope of inspiring you. This isn't plagiarism, even though we shamelessly borrow from each other. It's research...or when you shamelessly borrow from multiple persons rather than just one. At least that's what they used to tell me in college. While we all rejoice and curse the same sun, Solomon reminds me - whether he wrote it or had someone do it for him; the demands of a hundred wives can take away what little time you might have to write profound thoughts - there is nothing new under the sun.
So no number, or means by which we people can measure things will provide the true measure of a person's greatness or of their potential. Maybe that's why all parents think their child will grow up to be president. There's more inside us than viscera, Vicodin, Valium...and in many cases Viagra...that makes us what we are.
See you at the track. Bring your potential with you.
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