My after-care program at the Burke Rehab Hospital program is like a bad seduction. I have no one to blame but myself. After 2 weeks of featherweights, I decided that I should at least break a sweat.
I should have stuck with my original program, the one designed for me. Instead I wandered off the path. The machines spoke to me.
It started with the treadmill. My feet hurt all the time, even walking across the front lawn can be torturous. But damn, 2 tenths of a mile in eight minutes. That's nothing! So I accelerated. Within a month I'd worked up to .5 a mile, at higher but still low resistance.
The vertical bike, which is practically horizontal for me was just too easy on my original program. This did not suffice. I wanted the wheel to spin so fast that the attendant would throw buckets of water on it to keep it from bursting into flames.
And so it goes. It went this way with all the cardio stuff: I jacked the levels way up.
It is the ultimate testosterone measures, pounds pulled and pushed that have sunk me so low. 'If I could do it, I would', was my thinking. My measurement became tonnage moved in a week.
This is, sadly, the wrong way to do run an aftercare program. Deep down I wanted to comfortably, on familiar exercises, to push, pull or lift one quarter of the weight I worked out with when I was an oarsman in college. I'd forgotten that it took years of daily lifting to reach those points. I tried to get there in a month. I also forgotten the many warnings against exactly this behavior.
"My" program didn't work. My pain cycle began to increase and lengthen, my warning. While the original program might have been helping me, I sabotaged it with "My Program" because...I'M A MAN.
I'm a broken one, though. So It's back to square one. Back to the original program. Funny though, this place looks like a gym which is to say it's familiar, like an old friend. Too bad, huh. That old friend forgot my name.
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