Trust me, it only gets worse.
Today, I bring you a story from my workout. This is all true. It happened. And I'm not ashamed.
On my current program, Monday's are my heavy leg days. Unlike many people I cherish these days. I live for the "post leg workout I just got hit by a train" feeling. So, today, I was very excited to get into the gym and move some weight around.
Now at the gym. I'm a bit of a recluse. I put my headphones in, crank the dubstep, and shut out the world. And today was no exception to that. Until I started my incline leg presses.
About two working sets in out of five I was moving 450# for sets of 4-6. Yes that's me bragging, deal with it. When suddenly the WUB WUB WUB WUB BWWAAAAHHH NNNNN ZZZZZ WUB WUB WUB in my headphones came to a lull. Into my earballs wafts the simplistic piano melody of Gary Jules' rendition of "Mad World" over the gym's speakers.
For those of you unfamiliar with the song
Something in me snapped.
I was not prepared to hear this song that I truly love. My complicated emotions of gym rage face and a deep seeded sorrow for our worlds current climate collided like the Spartan 300 and the Persian Army.
I began shake laughing. Tears were welling up in my eyes because I was so emotionally distraught. I was smiling like a crazy person because I was so happy to hear this hauntingly beautiful song I hadn't heard in so long. My legs were screaming at me like a drill sergeant, "GET ONE MORE REP YOU PANSY!"
Yeah, that's right. I didn't stop my set for this nonsense.
I felt like in that very moment I understood what it was like to get menopause. My body not functioning the way I want it to. Cold, angry sweating. Violent mood swings, from pure elation and euphoria to oppressive sadness and back again, all in the matter of one leg press rep.
Trying to see myself from an outside perspective in this moment, I had to have looked like Michael Fassbender in X-Men: First Class, minus the fantastic hair and glass cutting jaw line. That moment where Magneto finds "the point between rage and serenity" and Michael Fassbender is smile-crying whilst making peace with his mother's death and simultaneously stopping Beast from DVRing that weeks episode of "Game of Thrones" by moving their giant 1960s DirecTV dish. Yes, I realize that joke is fraught with continuity issues but I don't care. This is my blog.
THAT IS WHAT I LOOKED LIKE
And then the song ended. I cooly finished my remaining sets, got up from the leg press machine, and began to strip the weight off, being sure to avoid any chance of eye contact with these strangers who had just seen me go through the emotional equivalent of watching Disney's "Up." And I carried on with my workout as if nothing had happened.
There is no lesson to this story. I have no advice based on this event. If I did it would be something to the likes of, "Don't have an emotional breakdown at the gym. It makes everyone uncomfortable. Do that at home with a plate of cheese and season four of Dexter on Netflix by yourself."
With good health and strong hamstrings,
Mike
