Go Outside.

I’ve tried a lot of new things this year, and that’s due in no small part to the loving, slightly degrading and mildly sexual experience I had with a university preorientation program and community—PWILD. Having that amazing group of friends for support during the beginning of the school year provided a safe and secure place. From this, it was easier for me to jump into other crazy things. It’s rather upsetting that I will not be able to staff the trip this summer and give back to the program that made me a far more interesting and vibrant person.

BUT, instead of PWILD this August, I get to do a different sort of summer orientation: this one’s for Navy ROTC.

All I know is that I’m getting sent up to some place in Virginia on August 11^th, and I can come back for Duke’s Freshman Orientation Week. When I asked what NROTC Orientation entails, the lieutenant helping me with my application just responded, “You’ll find out.”

Oh shit. It’s gonna be just like PWILD. Chock full of secrets, experiences both pleasant and awful, lots of sweat and mud, and possibly sleeping in an inch of water at night. Fun!

I suppose, then, the way I will carry on the lessons I’ve learned from PWILD is by ceasing my whiny inner monologue and learning to find the best in the situation. I survived PWILD, so if I apply myself and cease all bitching, I might enjoy whatever military shenanigans they throw at us! Unless I get a billion chigger bites on my ass on top of a bee sting. That sucked lots, and I never want to do that again.

At least I got to try on uniforms with “Love You Like a Love Song” playing in the background. That shit was surreal.

I used to be thrilled if I could even simply travel a mile in any length of time. Then, when I started running for fun senior year of high school, I locked in a fairly consistent 10:00 mile pace. Even at the beginning of this semester I think I could only manage a 9:50 mile pace over several miles, and a 9:30 pace for one mile.

A couple days ago, I realized I was running about an 8:20 mile. What the hell? When did I improve? Training and running still suck, and I never feel like I’m getting any faster.

Every time I go for a run, I still feel like the fat kid I was in middle and high school, unable to run more than a lap around the field hockey field. I’d hated sports back then because I was forced to play them, and I had always felt inferior to the girls on my teams because I couldn’t keep up with them.

I had blamed it on my scoliosis. I need to stop—my back hurts. It was my go-to excuse, and I abused it. My back spasmed and hurt on occasion, but it was rarely the stabbing, I-can’t-walk-or-breathe-or-stand-up feeling I got once when I lifted a hay bale improperly and legitimately threw out my back.

At first I felt guilty. I should be running with everyone else. They’re going to get better, and I’ll still be winded after ten seconds. But I kept using my excuse, and I started to convince myself.

When your back looks like that picture (and mine is pretty close, though you can’t tell unless I wear something skin- tight), people believe you when you say that it really hurts. Yet it wasn’t that bad, as far as pain goes. On a scale of 1-10, with one being no pain, and 10 being “on fire,” it was probably about a three when I usually stopped.

As such, it did hurt, and the pain was annoying. The exertion of running in general was already almost too much for out-of-shape-me to deal with, and when my back started to tense up as I ran, the annoyance of it all invariably broke me mentally before I could run long enough to get tired. In addition, I was just lazy regarding athletic pursuits, so adding more discomfort to physical exertion made sports far less appealing to me. Accordingly, I never pushed myself, and so I never got into good shape.

I do remember what inspired me to start running, though: lettering in field hockey. My only goals for high school were 1) Get a boyfriend and 2) Letter in a sport.

Aaand that’s one of my best friends wearing MY letter jacket, so you can guess how this all turned out. I lettered three times—once in field hockey and twice in riflery (precision shooting, technically). I also had three boyfriends, so I guess I tripled each goal. The possibility of lettering inspired me to grow a pair (of steely ovaries) and deal with the pain. I wanted that goddamn letter, and two 40-degree angles in my back weren’t going to stop me.

I had always heard maxims about sports being “ten percent luck, twenty percent skill/Fifteen percent concentrated power of will/Five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain” or whatever. But I’d always thought I’m a good student, so the mental part should come naturally. I guess I’m just physically incapable.

Hah. Haha. I was so wrong. The way I think of things now is more like this:

I realized eventually that you have to work hard to make progress. You can’t fudge objective physical tests. Also, if you start off at a disadvantage, it is going to be hard to overcome that. I didn’t know how hard it was going to be until I actually started trying, and I should have learned that a while ago.

Also, as it turns out, if you try to push through pain, you can make it worse. After I’d trained so hard over the summer to prepare for field hockey, I had to work even harder in camp. I couldn’t go at my own pace, and so it hurt a lot. But I got new injuries. I tore my quad. I rolled an ankle. I took a ball to the knee. These were injuries from exertion, so I okay with it all for a while. Then my back started acting up. Really acting up this time. In rushing to keep up with the other girls, I must have held some muscle differently, making my back spasm painfully after practice. I dealt with this through junior year, but quit the team senior year. The girls talked about me behind my back, saying I was no good at field hockey, and making fun of my lack of physical prowess. I quit because I couldn’t handle their outright cattiness in addition to the physical and mental stresses of the conditioning.

I felt embarrassed and ashamed, like a failure. Yet, quitting field hockey allowed me to work out on my own; I could improve at my own pace. I learned to actually enjoy running, and I think I turned a bad situation into a badass one in the end. Tell me I didn’t, and I will break you.

So, moral of the story? You’ve got pain? Deal with it. Everyone has pain, and you’re not special. If you complain, people might not understand, and they may make your experience unpleasant. Also, you get to work harder to achieve exactly the same things that they do. The good news, though, is that such achievement is possible, and there’s no shame in trying. It’s only shameful when you don’t take advantage of what you do have.

Looking back, I am disgusted that I believed my own lie about scoliosis limiting my ability. It still hurts, but now I know how to manage. The way I learned that, though, was through facing that pain directly. Running hurts, pushups hurt, living hurts, but you just have to push through it. In my case, doing that was a risk. My parents and doctor were concerned that I might damage my back if I went too hard, but I was so sick of being weak. Also, I really wanted to letter in field hockey.  The pain sucked, but whatever. I can do all this now:

            Putting up with shooting nerve pains and numbness in my left leg (bad enough on occasion to keep me awake at night) was worth it. Over time, I grew stronger, and the pain went away. And all I had to do was apply every ounce of my physical and mental strength to accomplish it.

I can only do about forty pushups in two minutes right now. That’s an improvement, considering I could only do thirty before I started my personal project to do 100 pushups in 2 minutes (hahh…). I’d dropped down to a max of ten when I got sick during Tenting for the Duke-UNC basketball game. But you know what? Forty pushups is pretty darn beast, according to the Navy’s PRT standards (PRT means…. uh…. physical readiness test? Pungent radish taint? Probs the first one).

 But yeah! Look at that! It’s proof that my pushup ability is darn close to “excellent,” and could be “outstanding” if I pushed just a little harder. Now, if I could only swim a little faster (my current speed is probably on par with a flipperless manatee), I should be all set. 

I read Ender’s Game a long time ago, probably around fourth grade, and I just started reading it again at school this year. All the challenges imposed on Ender in Battle School made me really feel bad about all the things I was procrastinating that night. Even though he was fictional, Ender put up with all the unfairness his superiors threw at him, and though he didn’t succeed at every little thing, it all led him to his ultimate triumph (spoilers!) at the end of the book. He could handle all that as a kid—what the hell was I doing, feeling too apathetic to send a bunch of stupid emails and write an article or two?

A tiny Gunnery Sgt. Hartman popped into my head. ALENE. ARE YOU GOING TO LET A FICTIONAL CHARACTER BE MORE BADASS THAN YOU? HE ISN’T EVEN REAL! WERE YOU BORN A LAZY PIECE OF SHIT, OR DID YOU HAVE TO WORK ON IT?So I told the imaginary Gunnery Sergeant that no, I was not going to let a fictional character outdo me, and no, I was not lazy. I thought for a minute, realizing that all I had to do was send some stupid emails for a job—I was even getting paid to do it! I was afraid of… what? People responding to my emails with a simple “NO”? 

Taking risks isn’t always so hard. Applying for those jobs (the sources of the work I had been putting off) had been scary at first, and I wasn’t sure I would get them. That was a risk, and it was hard to start, but it was a one-time thing. It’s what comes after those initial risks—whether maintaining that position you were afraid to apply for, or even dealing with the consequences of the risk—that takes true commitment, resolve and character in my view.

As I may have mentioned once or twice (or several…hundred…times), I recently started training BJJ. The sport is grappling-based, and as such, you’re frequently in close contact with a bunch of sweaty men (BJJ is kind of a sausage fest). Accordingly, for the first few sessions I attended, I felt awkward, clumsy, fat, and generally disgusting while enduring chokes, and being squished and contorted in ways I didn’t know my body could bend.

It reminded me uncomfortably of middle-school. I was hyper-aware of my body and the numerous uncomfortable things being done to it.

Though bodily awareness isn’t the same as mental self-awareness, I think it’s similar enough and requires a similar approach. There’s a theme in Buddhist thought advising against self-discovery, contending that such is not beneficial as it instead results in the construction of a self that actually serves to cut you off from your true being. This is not exactly the same as self-awareness (which is not so bad up to a point), but too often we seem to build up an unreal self in questing for self-awareness. Consider personality tests, in which you are definitely putting “yourself in a box,” as one of the comments on the reading said. In doing so, you are constructing yourself. Accordingly, instead of making up who you are, I think it’s more accurate and gainful to explore your connections with the world around you. Behavior is a pattern, inconstant and constantly influenced. The way to understanding yourself is to comprehend the fullness of your experience.

Thus, something like mindfulness is a better virtue to cultivate. It does not focus so much on awareness of one’s self, but focuses instead on awareness of how one’s self fits into the flow of time and matter around the consciousness (back up, we got some crazy hippie shit here). Obnoxious and pretentious as that sounds, I have to agree. And back to BJJ (yessss): the only way I ever got better and started to enjoy it was by putting my awkwardness behind me, striving to take my focus away from bodily sensation (and how hysterically awkward the position called “mount” is…). Instead, I turned my attention to my opponent’s body, allowing me to participate in the fight and resist, rather than just staying too wrapped up in my awkwardness to deal.

In such a way, by being focused too much on one’s own body and mind, it’s easy to get either paralyzed by sensation or lost in making up a self that didn’t exist until you defined it. Self-awareness, is not an ideal goal alone, as it should be sought in the context of mindfulness rather than inadvertent self-construction.

I mean, really—there’s a limit to how self-aware you want to be in a situation like this:

Every so often, I need a kick in the pants to remind me that I still have a lot of work to do to be fit.

I met this girl, LT, who’s training to become a Crossfit instructor. She needs guinea pigs to practice her training skills on, so one of my roommates, a friend of ours, and some rando that LT knows are all doing Crossfit with her once a week.

A while ago, Crossfit seemed pretty sketchy to me, almost cult-like in fact. I didn’t like how expensive it was, and I didn’t believe that it could be so effective. Since trying it, though, I have to give the system some credit. It kicks your butt. On Friday, we did a pressing circuit, and my lats are still sore. Not much else is though, thanks to awesome BJJ conditioning.

My legs, however, are a different story. I’d always been so worried about having fat arms that I usually work arms when I lift, and I generally don’t do legs. I know that’s a really bad thing to do though, so I usually run to work my legs (distance and intervals and hill workouts). 

As I realized today, that’s not enough. I already vaguely knew my legs were not up to par with my arms from BJJ: when standing up to break someone’s closed guard, I can’t always stand completely up because I’m just that weak. I know the right position to be in, but if the guy outweighs me by any significant amount, I just can’t finish it, so I have to just try to slip a knee in to break guard, which is lower-percentage for sure.

Regarding Crossfit, I can press a 45-lb bar 21 times, no problem, but I can’t do even five squats (front or back) with the same bar. My leg strength is just pathetic, and I’ll bet when I try to get up from writing this, I’ll already be sore.

What we did today (the WOD-workout of the day) was four sets of 12 front squats, 12 pushups, and 12 box jumps. It’s simple, but brutal. This seems to be the essence of Crossfit. It’s all quick but intense workouts, and I can’t wait to see if this delivers results.