Posts Tagged ‘soreness’

Top ten current faves from Greatist

Posted: September 17, 2012 in CrossFit, Exercise, Fitness, Health, Inspiration, Motivation, Obesity, Weight Loss
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Peanut Butter Cookie Batch

Peanut Butter Cookie Batch (Photo credit: Greatist): I can’t stand peanut butter, but maybe some of you crave it.

I love Greatist. I encourage anyone interested in health, fitness and weight loss to subscribe to them. No, I have no financial or personal interest in them, so feel free to take it or leave it with my blessing and no effect on my pocketbook:

  1. How to foam roll like a pro
  2. Can you be too sore to work out?
  3. 10 interval training mobile apps to download right now
  4. News: Talk to yourself to stay motivated
  5. Schedule your day to reduce stress
  6. Give in to cravings to avoid binges
  7. Ultimate guide to good posture at work
  8. Develop a routine to improve sleep
  9. Why do I eat when I’m not hungry?
  10. How to handle criticism like a pro

There seems to be a “routines” theme in my list. Maybe I’m trying to tell myself something. I’m not even touching the word “pro,” given that I’m a woman old enough to remember that as a euphemism.

Milestone: the self-enforcing workout

Posted: August 16, 2012 in CrossFit, Exercise, Fitness, Health, Motivation
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The Illness/Wellness Spectrum

I’ve thought about illness to wellness spectrum (above) a lot lately. Whenever I think about it, I recall civil defendants’ attorneys describing “a preponderance of the evidence” as meaning the plaintiff has to push a boulder over the top of a peak before a jury can conclude that the plaintiff has won the case. (Plaintiffs’ attorneys, on the other hand, will start out like an Olympic diver at the top of a platform with outstretched arms, but with more clothes, and begin see-sawing to explain that the scales just need to be tipped.)

Pushing a boulder up a mountain is not a bad metaphor for getting fit when you’re already chronically ill. Or, better, climbing an icy slope with a backpack. You gotta push up that slope, and any time you lose your grip or your balance, you start sliding back down that damn mountain, with the load of the past dragging at you.

And now I think I may have found an ice axe, which you use to stick into an icy slope to make sure you don’t slide any farther. The maneuver referred to as a self-arrest. I like that term: You stop yourself before you start picking up speed on your way down. From Wikipedia:

 The longer the delay of the climber before he/she starts to put weight on the axe’s pick the longer s/he freely accelerates down the slope.

Ariel Bravy learns to self-arrest with an ice axe on St. Mary’s Glacier, Colorado.

In the past I’ve worked out and thought, gee, I feel better now, but when I stopped, I had to think about it before I realized I kind of missed it.

That’s not the case any longer. These days, at the three-day no-workout mark I start declining and find myself in increasing pain. That’s when I use the ice axe. It is something that makes me say to myself that there is no more time for delay, no excuse, and that if I don’t do something now, even if it hurts, things will just get worse.

I’m not talking about the stiffness and pain of the morning. That’s one of the reasons I hate waking up. I start out sleepy and warm, and then the fog dissipates and, like a morning glory, my pain opens to the sun. But those creaks tend to even out (or at least recede into the background) as the day goes on and I warm up.

Nor am I talking about DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness), the sore you get from breaking down and rebuilding muscles. (I almost like that pain; it means I’ve done something to push myself.)

No, the pain that is the warning arrives at night when I try to go to sleep that tells me I’m starting to fall. No anti-inflammatory will make it go away. I can’t reposition my body to ease it. Ice nor heat will beat it into submission. It’s a bone-deep ache that generally affects me from the hips down. And when it happens, I either have to be so sleepy that I could fall asleep while someone was amputating my leg, or I have to get out of bed and at least stretch in order to get the pain level down to the point I can sleep.

On those nights, I wake up knowing that no matter what is hurting me, I’ve got to do *some* sort of exercise. Time for the ice axe.

I’ve crawled out of bed, ate a little something and hydrated, then exercised, and crawled back to bed, completely spent for the day. I’ve exercised with a night mask and ear plugs (on better days, inside with sunglasses) because of a migraine (and had it get worse during the exercise). I’ve exercised with twinges in my knee that I jammed. I’ve had nausea and dizziness while working out (when light-headed, I try to make sure I don’t do anything that involves standing with a heavy weight). I’ve sneezed, hacked, coughed, wheezed and otherwise been an allergy queen during my workouts..

I’ve had a lot of what I’ve come to call fibro spasms (more intensely during workouts; they seem to lay off once I stop): the closest I can come to describing it is that an area along any muscle fiber of about 3 inches long and a half-inch wide that suddenly hurts as if someone pushed into a particularly tender bruise. It lasts for less than 30 seconds in any given spot, then wanders to kick a different muscle.

But none of that deters me once the three-day ache kicks in; it makes me  use all my will to plunge my imaginary ice axe into the side of the friggin’ mountain and say to myself, “Yeah, this sucks, but do you really want to hit the bottom of this slope at full speed?”

And I work out. It may be modified or scaled because of whatever is going on, but I get out of bed and move and lift and stretch.

Someday I’ll get over the top and let the backpack coast down ahead of me and spill out a million fragments. And then I’ll walk down the other side.

Blow winds and crack your cheeks

Posted: June 9, 2011 in Exercise, Fitness, Health, Obesity, Uncategorized, Weight Loss
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Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!

You cataracts and hurricanes, spout

Til you have drenched our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity of the world!

                                                       Act III, Scene II, “The Tragedie of King Lear,” William Shakespeare

Not into Shakespeare? Before you completely give him up as a lost cause, watch “Slings and Arrows,” a Canadian series. One of the writers is a “Kids in the Hall” alum, and it’s smart and funny. Even the  ”not-crazy-about-Shakes” folks in our little group found they could like him.

So why the Shakespeare quote? Because it popped into my head last night when I lay down in my bed and felt my right shoulder decide that it was not going to be happy in its current position, and after trying to rearrange myself without waking up my husband, I felt tears of sheer frustration filling my eyes and watering my eyelashes. I wanted to howl into the wind, and then Lear’s famous speech popped into my head.

The setup for the speech could take quite  a lot of space; after all, it is from the third act. The down and dirty is that King Lear, because of his own vanity, fatigue, arrogance or impending dementia, decides to retire by dividing up his kingdom among his three daughters. The youngest (and the only one who actually gives a damn), Cordelia, refuses to play along with her father’s method of deciding who gets what, which is to flatter the old man effusively, telling him how much you love him. So her two older, evil sisters get the kingdom between them and poor Cordelia is cast out. The other sisters then scheme to get Dad out of the pictures as much as possible.

At the point of the speech, Lear has run out into the night into the woods, provoked by his two elder daughters, who have taken away his pride (they’ve already got his money and power) and exposed themselves for the lousy human beings they are. And Lear screams into the storm that breaks upon him before finally allowing himself to be cajoled inside a hovel for shelter.

Lear was shaking his fist at the storm, yelling at it to do all it could to him and to the world around him. Why? Well, there are many scholars who’d be able to defend a dissertation on the subject, but I’m going to take a stab at it myself.

This is an old man who realizes the depth of his mistake and is stuck in a hell of his own making. He screams at the wind and thunder, challenging them to do their worst, not caring if the storm destroys everything about him. Why not? He’s lost his family, his possessions, his dignity, so who cares what the storm does?

But Lear is not a victim. He voluntarily ran out into the damn storm. Lear set into motion the chain of events that ended up with him out in the night with no shelter. And I think that as the storm hit, he realized that he was no longer in control of things  and that he was being destroyed as a result of his own decisions. So, when the storm blows in, he blows up, letting all his anger at himself and his circumstances clash with the elements.

Last night, I could relate to that. My last three days of workouts have been a bit choppy. Yesterday should have been my rest day, but I ended up taking two days off in a row because I had a migraine the day after my last rest day. I had a touch of it still when I worked out the first day, but by the end of it, I was feeling better. The next day, I quit halfway through my pushups to report to Coach Gary that I was getting a sharp pain in my right shoulder — it didn’t hurt except during certain motions. I dropped almost all the lifting for the last two rounds of exercises. It irritated me, but not too much.

And then yesterday. I was looking forward to the workout, which was kind of novel; it’s a battle most days to go change clothes and then another battle to force myself to put on  my shoes and yet another skirmish to get off my hiney-ho and start working out.

So I jump on the treadmill, do my 10 minutes on the thing and head out to the garage for  the day’s challenges. Gary starts off with “Okay, I want you go do these as fast as you can and really push yourself.” Being well-trained in the art of taking things the wrong way, I want to know if he didn’t think I’d been pushing myself all along. And what about form? I lose form when I speed up too  much and I don’t want to get injured.

He met all my objections: No, this is not a comment on any other workout, I just want to push yourself and go as fast as you can. I think he’s trying to be encouraging, but I wish I could tune him into my internal dialogue sometimes, which is filled with me reviewing all the instructions for every move and yelling at myself to “Keep going.”

I got through the first round, but near the end of the second, when I went to do the push press, I pulled up like a lame horse. My left ankle started screaming at me. It was sharp, and kept getting worse. I tried to put my weight on it and almost fell down, so Gary put his arm around me, took me inside the house, and kindly set up the ice wrap for the ankle.

I was pissed. I didn’t get to do the workout, and cascades of pain were now being set off by the ankle. My calves hurt (although they seemed better after rolling them), my butt already hurt from sitting in a computer  chair for too long, my feet were swollen and my neck hurt. But it wasn’t until I went to bed and could not find a comfortable position that my own storm broke.

Is it too late? Did I screw up so bad in the last 30 years that it’s beyond hope? Am I going to manage to injure myself to the point I can’t exercise? Am I going to ever lose the damned, thrice- and quadruple-damned weight?

Or is it past the time of hope? Am I doomed to live out the rest of my life as a semi-invalid because I was too stupid or pig-headed to adopt healthier habits and, most damningly, willfully blind of the consequences.

So why didn’t some ghost of fat girls past visit me? She could have shown up around some holiday set aside for stuffing yourself full of food, prove to me I’d messed up and give me a way out. But no. No nighttime haunts by repentant ghosties. Just my own screaming into the wind.

I cannot undo what I’ve done. I can’t turn back time, as I so desperately wish I could, and turn myself back into a 20- or 30-year-old woman with minimal weight gain and a chance to get my fitness under control. I weighed 130 pounds the day I graduated from law school in 1989. I’d had both my children. I should have started exercising then, but “I didn’t have time.” I want to go back and punch my younger self in the face for that. I blew the opportunity to get it together while I was young, before I had accumulated so many injuries and diseases that when I hurt one ankle, every other body part wants to compete for my attention.

Yesterday night, I got a cramping, sharpish pain in my right leg that I thought was going to kill me.  Last night, I had a whining shoulder and burning knees, as well as the sensitive Achilles tendons.  It’s a chorus of furies, and they want me to go back to stop trying to fix the past.

It would be so much easier to give up. To throw my hands up and say, “Well, I tried, but even my wrists were  in pain. It’s never going to happen because it’s taking too long and I keep verging on injury. I’m going to hurt myself sooner or later, so I might as well quit before it happens.”

What I’m screaming into the storm is “You idiot, Jodi, why the hell didn’t you do something about this sooner? Been a better  role model? Been preparing for getting old?”

Maybe that’s part of it; I never really planned for getting old (long story, that). When I was 14, I was convinced I wouldn’t live past 30. When I was 30, I didn’t think I’d see  my 50th. And here I have passed all those milestones, and I know that I’ve procrastinated myself into a ball of fat with a little muscle tissue and bone that are stressed out because I keep making so many demands on them … new demands, demands my body isn’t used to dealing with.

But I don’t have many options. I can keep trying to get out of this hole, or I can give up and be a prisoner of my past choices.

The problem is that I don’t know if the choice is mine anymore. Have I now come to the point where I’ve run out into the storm with no shelter and no way to stay dry and safe, left only with the possibility that I’m going to be struck by lightning or die of exposure or starvation?

Lear is a tragedy, which, if you’ve read any of Shakespeare’s tragedies you already know, generally means lots of carcasses by the end. But although all life inevitably ends in death, the death need not be premature, nor does aging have to be a misery. I think I’ll risk the lightning pains over the slow atrophy of muscles. I keep telling myself (and everyone else) that changing my life is as much a mind game as it is anything, and screaming futility at the elements, challenging them to condemn me, isn’t a good way to play the game.

Instead, I think I’ll try to get armed with a little more knowledge about my physiology, keep taking the progress up slowly, take time to heal and listen to my wonderful coach, who keeps telling me to be patient. Patience? Hmm. Guess that’s another life change I’m going to have to integrate into the program.

Curses, storm of my own making. I’ll endure your wind and rain and hail and whatnot. Storms pass even more quickly than lives, and although recent events have shown just how much debris they can leave in their path, restoration is always possible as long as you have breath within you. Not easy, not quick, but possible with a whole lot of effort and even more patience.

To suck it up or not to suck it up, that is the question

Posted: May 22, 2011 in CrossFit, Exercise, Fitness, Uncategorized
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My daughter-in-law said something encouraging when I was groaning and creaking in and out of a recliner because of my workout soreness. She said, “The bad soreness will go away after a few weeks; after that you’ll only be lightly sore.” Nice to know.

You can expect muscle soreness when you work out. You can expect your ligaments to be stretched and a little unhappy. Those pains actually seem to get better during a workout and bother you more after prolonged periods of disuse, although scientists aren’t sure why. Contrary to what we all thought, it appears lactic acid only causes the burning sensation you sometimes get while exercising, but not the “delayed-onset muscles soreness.” At any rate, the burn means you’re about at the muscle’s limit, and the soreness is part of the process of rebuilding muscle. So you can blow that kind of pain off and count it as part of retraining your body.

But there’s also the pain you need to pay attention to and consider whether you need to scale back until you’ve gotten stronger, and work on form and intensity. And some pain means you need to take a day or so off to heal, to see your doctor or even go to the emergency room.

It’s easy to get caught up in the “more macho than thou” games or to be embarrassed to admit you’re hurt because you don’t want to be perceived as a weenie. Don’t. CrossFit is great because it can accommodate injury or lower abilities, so take advantage of that flexibility. And if you allow yourself to be really injured, you’ll be off your exercise routine longer than if you take care of yourself.

It’s not just the deconditioned or the overweight who can injure themselves. Gary, my husband/coach who is in great shape and rarely injures himself, somehow hurt his back a little just the other day. He’s icing it and staying away from things that cause it to hurt “the bad way,” but he’s continuing to work out using the exercises that don’t stress it and scaling back on the ones that do until he can do them.

My knee injury flare is another case of when stopping is a good thing. Right now, the tops of both knees ache a little, but it’s not a sharp pain and I feel better after walking around on them, so I’m still good to go. But a few days ago, my left knee screamed at me during the workout. I’ve injured myself enough times to have a pretty good idea of when I need to pay attention and when I don’t, but whenever you have a sudden, sharp pain, that’s generally a bad sign. I iced the knee that day and the next, took an unscheduled rest day, and my knee was up for the next workout.

Sharp or intense pain that is qualitatively different from what you feel some hours after you’ve finished working out is something to investigate. Joints are particularly susceptible to errors in the form, or the how, of any exercise. That includes the joints you don’t generally think of, like the places where your vertebrae meet  (the bits that look like wings)(the facet joint) or the joint that is between your tailbone and your hipbone (the sacroiliac joint, commonly referred to as the SI joint).

I’ve injured both a facet joint and an SI joint. The first was when I was younger and lighter, and it still took me over six weeks to recover from, even with physical therapy and muscle relaxants.  Twice. I remember the second time better than the first, because I knew exactly when I did it. I was lifting a pile of casebooks in the law library from the bottom shelf and didn’t have my back in the right position and I felt a weird twinge in my back. The next day I could hardly straighten my back. That’s the kind of thing you see the doctor for.

The SI joint took a while to figure out because I had weird symptoms. The primary place where it hurt was in my lower left abdominal area, so the docs went through all the possible GI and GYN items first. It’s more common to hurt in your lower back or thighs, but referred pain like mine isn’t unusual. After exhausting the other possibilities (and when I’d gotten to the point that 2 vicodine at a time didn’t do anything but take the edge off the pain), I went to a physical therapist who shoved a finger in the right spot and almost made me yell, it hurt so bad. One good maneuver, and the therapist had the damn thing back where it belonged and the pain lessened almost immediately.

What I found interesting about the experience was that Stephanie, the physical therapist, had also had an SI joint problem at one point; she was a competitive pole vaulter, so not a deconditioned person like me. It’s more a matter of moving the wrong way at the wrong time, which can, but doesn’t have to be, a result of exercise. She did it stepping off a curb.

If you get a sudden pain and then a muscle bunches up away from the original pain, you’ve probably torn a ligament, and you need to call your doctor or get to the ER. That one’s pretty hard to miss.

Bottom line: If it hurts right away and really bad, check it out with a doctor. If it pings, pops or twinges, check it out with a doctor. If it’s the worst pain you’ve ever had or if you suddenly can’t move a limb or joint, go to the ER. If it swells and bruises, ice it and see the doctor. If it’s just sore or achey, particularly if it gets better with movement, keep on going. If your muscle starts burning, push the envelope, but if you just can’t stand it any longer, you can give it a little break to get some oxygen, and then get back on with your workout.

If you do something dumb like me, and bop the back of your head on the hyperlite during a situp because you didn’t make sure it was clear, well, you probably do it a lot (I do) and know the difference between something you’ll shake off and something you can’t.

Of course, I’m not a doctor or any other kind of health care professional, so if you have any doubt, check it out with the folks who are trained to figure it out. I can only share what I’ve experienced, not diagnose you.

As far as the soreness goes, hang in there. You’ll keep discovering new muscles (even in your hands and feet) you didn’t know were there, but that means you are getting stronger.

The day of rest

Posted: May 19, 2011 in CrossFit, Exercise, Fitness, Health, Uncategorized
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Rest day. It should be the best day of CrossFit, but, oddly enough, it isn’t.

Why? Because I seem to be stiffer and sorer and I usually have a rough first day back.

And now, because of my knee problem and falling off the wagon (temporarily), I’m getting more of them.

And it’s my own fault, because I asked what I thought was a simple question. You may recall that I am obsessed with earning foot rubs for consistency in my CrossFit workouts. The deal was that after two sets of 5 days of working out (with a rest day in between), I earned a foot rub from my wonderful husband/coach. So when I missed the day after my first in a 5-day set, I asked whether I should start a new 5-day period running, or just workout for 3 days and then begin the next 5-day set to count toward a foot rub.

Turns out it wasn’t a simple question. Five days on, one day off is a common practice, but in CrossFit’s training materials is an article by CrossFit founder Greg Glassman that says “Generally, we have found that three days on and one day off allows for a maximum sustainability at maximum intensities.” [If you read the article and are a language fanatic like me, try to overlook the punctuation errors and the use of the word "fetes" instead of "feats"; as far as I know, the typical CrossFit workout doesn't include parties.]  Maximum depends on the person working out; my maximum sustainability is way lower than the average CrossFitter, but the principle still applies.

However, as Glassman points out in another article, “A Theoretical Template for CrossFit’s Programming,” three days on and one day off doesn’t synch well with the typical five days on, two days off work week. Hence the popularity of five days on and either one or two days off within the CrossFit community.

After these observations, Glassman’s explanation starts to get really complicated, as the importance of the rest interval depends on the mix of exercises in the particular workout. The bottom line, though, is that in order to continue improving, you must build rest days into any fitness regime. Elizabeth Quinn at About.com puts it well:

Rest is physically necessary so that the muscles can repair, rebuild and strengthen. For recreational athletes, building in rest days can help maintain a better balance between home, work and fitness goals.

She goes on to explain the difference between short-term recovery (the hours immediately after exercise) and long-term recovery (rest days … and even rest weeks) in her article, emphasizing that the body needs time to repair and build muscles, recover from strain and adapt to new demands placed on it. Without rest days, you are more prone to injury.

And it’s not only rest days that matter. You need to makes sure you get sufficient sleep. If sleeping is a problem for you, then you may want to look at ways to improve your sleep, up to and including getting a sleep study done, particularly if you hear from everyone that you snore. For me, the wake-up call was when we visited friends out of town and my snoring wasn’t immediately identified by our hostess, who went up and down the hall trying to figure out the weird noise. When I asked her just how loud it was, she said, “Oh, I think the neighbors probably heard it.” (Not only do I have smartass children, I have smartass friends.)

So, after discussing it with Coach Ken Tollett of Hill Country CrossFit, my husband/coach has put me on a rest schedule every three days. After he realized my big sticking point was centered on my foot rub points, he gave me a deal I couldn’t refuse: I get one for every three 3-day stint.

So take your day off, really off (e.g., not getting too caught up in non-workout activities, as blogger Kelly found out), even if the day back seems harder. Your body will thank you for it.

Dr. Superpez: or How I stopped worrying and learned to love the press

Posted: May 10, 2011 in CrossFit, Exercise, Fitness, Obesity, Uncategorized
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“Love” is probably an overstatement, but how else would I match the movie title?

The overhead press, even the weenie version I do, is a pain in the neck. Literally. Your neck will get friggin’ sore with it. For other newbies like me, an overhead press looks, at first, pretty simple. You’re just going to lift a bar over your head, and I started with a PVC pipe. Not so simple. Not in the least.

My husband had been walking me through it before he left town, and now that he’s back, he’s gotten to review my form. I was all kinds of pleased with myself just for doing it while he was gone. Turns out I only remembered three of the multitudinous things one must do all at once during the press. I used to think I could multitask. Not so much with the press, because I have a hard time even remembering what count I’m on.

The three things I remembered: Superman, Pez, and “elbows out.” When doing the press, you stand like Superman, chest out and shoulders back with your feet about shoulder-width apart.  You then “rack” the bar, grasping it overhand and then holding it up to your neck. Yeah, all the way. Supposedly pretty much over the notch in the collarbones. Not me. I have too much adipose tissue (take that, fat, I’m making you sound all clinical) in my wobbly upper arms. After a while, Gary gave up and said, “Just worry about keeping your elbows out; when we add weight, it’ll take care of the problem.” He also assured me that everyone says that at first. Even skinny people. I’m having a hard time buying it, but, okay, let’s go from there.

You then have to get your face out of the way, because you will otherwise smack yourself in the chin or move the bar out in front of you, which will be a bad idea someday when there are weights on it. The bar needs to go in a straight line up over your head. So you act like a Pez and suck your head back. After the bar has passed the top of your head, you should put it back where it belongs while you hold the bar over your head. I keep forgetting and try to stay permanently pezzed out.

Turns out Gary got the Superman/Pez instructions from Heather Bergeron, who, among many other achievements, coaches a lot of kids. So, yes, simple instructions are good, even for adults, particularly for those of us whose exercise intelligence is on the elementary school level. Here’s the video, some of which I may be reiterating:

[Haven't gotten to the Oompa-loompas yet; I think she's talking about the Gene Wilder version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I never cared for. Give me Johnny Depp any day. And the stick trick? Yeah, you put a stick against my butt and shoulders and it will never, ever, go straight up.]

Now that the sucker is over your head (and this is the part I completely forgot), you have to straighten your arms all the way out and then shrug your shoulders upside your ears. This is the part that will make your neck hurt. Or at least that’s what I think; I haven’t asked and could very well be completely wrong. (I got through seven years of higher level education without ever taking an anatomy class, so I make no promises. I’ve learned what I know through work, reading, and my own dadgum illnesses.)

Gravity will be your friend, next, surely. No such luck. After you’ve pezzed your head back out of the way, you are supposed to slowly bring it back down to your neck — and keep those elbows out.

By this time, I have no idea how many I’ve done. Six, maybe? Oh, no, it was just all those blinking steps that made me think I’d been through more than one exercise by now.

But, I have to admit, I’m getting so I don’t forget all the steps; just a few every time. Occasionally only one. And once in a while, I get all of it right.

That’s actually a pretty good feeling.

Side effects of CrossFit usage

Posted: May 7, 2011 in CrossFit, Exercise, Health, Uncategorized
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The first indicator I had that my workouts were going to last longer than just the time I was actively participating in them was when the hubbie and I sat outside to have some watermelon (a really tasty one, as it happens).  Before I finished my wedge, I had to put it down because I couldn’t hold it any longer; my arms were shaking too badly. This was several hours after the workout was over.

And then there’s the soreness. Since I have fibromyalgia in my big list o’ diseases, I’m pretty used to aching all over. This soreness at least means I’m getting somewhere, although it has occasionally been bad enough to give me trouble sleeping. My not-a-bit overweight-or-out-of-shape daughter-in-law swears it’s not just me.

Worst of all, I finally have to admit it: the hubby was right (along with every fitness specialist in the world, I suppose) that exercising actually can, in the long run, make you feel better and more energized. On a different day than the watermelon incident, it had been an uphill slog all day, and I didn’t want to exercise. But I did it, and, frighteningly, I felt better the rest of the day. Why scary? Because it means I really can’t quit if I want to be healthy.

Hmmm, how can I rationalize this away? Maybe  it’s an instance of you feel better after compared to when you’re exercising. Y’know, like in the ancient joke “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.”  Doctor: “Well, stop doing it.” Or maybe it’s the really nice shower after you’re all sweaty and salty. Maybe I would have felt better later in the day anyway.

Nope. None of them seem to cover it.

Damn. I hate being wrong.