Day 60: Two Midnights Gone!

Here we are at Day 60—two-thirds of the way through this program. You know what this means? We should all start quaking in fear and dread because the program is going to get a lot harder!

Strangely enough, that's exactly what I thought way back at the beginning of this whole journey. Heck, I actually think that every Friday night in uneasy anticipation of the Saturday morning email which is when Patrick doles out the punishments. And yet I still push myself through those exercises every day regardless of the little voice in my head that keeps trying to convince me that I really could skip a day or two. Luckily, each day that voice gets quieter and quieter as it realizes that I'm not really listening to it anymore.

Back when I was having severe knee pain after doing the jump ropes, that little voice was pretty strong. There were days I so wanted to stop putting myself through that pain and that voice had much influential power back then. But I didn't stop. I couldn't stop. I had made some big promises that I meant to keep, which gave me the strength to keep going.

Bit by bit, that voice lost the power. Bit by bit my knees got better. Bit by bit my body got stronger. That's the way the whole thing works. Bit by bit.

When I use to go to the gym, I saw this one guy try to do the impossible. Now he was a big guy both in the tall and wide departments. He would go up to one of the machines, put as much weight as he could on it, and then try to lift it all the while screaming at the top of his lungs as though he were being crushed in a trash compactor. After he made one or two reps, he would drop the weights with a tremendous CLANG! sound and he'd go to the next machine and repeat the whole process. Now I'm not an experienced gym rat, but even I could tell that he was doing all the wrong things. He wanted results now and he was bound to kill himself to get them.

Yeah, not me. I'm not killing myself like that guy. I can't say it's totally painless as the muscles get sore every day I work them, but it's not the excruciating kind. It tells me that I'm doing good, that I'm getting healthier, that I'm on the road to wellness. Bit by bit. One step at a time.