A Different Kind of Resolution

With the arrival of each New Year, I find that time seems to be passing more quickly. It’s that inverse proportion or time perception and age. It’s one I suppose we can all relate too; when you’re young time passes slowly and you wish you could speed it up and when you’re older time passes quickly and you wish you could somehow slow it down.

During childhood you can’t wait to become a teenager. Then you have the other milestones; at 16 you can legally drive, at 18 you’re considered an adult, and at 21 you can legally drink alcohol. Look out! 25 just sounds cool and 30 also has a nice ring to it as well. It sounds respectable, like you’ve finally grown up, got your act together, and you’re at the top of your game, hopefully. There are so many things to look forward to as a kid that we want to rush right into adulthood. I think it would be nice if upon reaching 30 we would go into a holding period and begin to age ever so slightly while time passes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

At any rate, you wake up one day and suddenly you’re 40 and you wonder where all those years went. Although 47 is still relatively young I find I spend more time than I should reminiscing about the things I used to be able to do that I can no longer do. More on that in a minute.

So this year, the New Year snuck up on me like a lightning bolt. I didn’t even think about any New Year’s resolutions until the first day of the year which didn’t exactly give me a lot of time to prepare. On Jan. 2, I decided that this would be the year I would get back in shape. Yes, that would be my resolution for the year; I would lose my excess weight and become lean and healthy and get in the best shape of my life. That doesn’t really sound so difficult. I was looking at it more like an exciting challenge.

So, in preparation for my new lifestyle I went to the grocery store that morning and purchased an assortment of fresh produce. Upon returning home, I made a big pot of homemade vegetable soup. The plan would be to eat the soup along with a portion of protein for a healthy lunch for the next few days. Planning is essential if you want to succeed and I now had a good idea about how I would fuel my body in the days ahead. The next step was to plan my workouts.

I decided to embark on a new and highly demanding fitness regime called P90X. It works on the muscle confusion principle. There are 12 different videos and you watch a different one everyday. Of course, you have to do the exercises as well. The idea behind muscle confusion is that your muscles continue to be stimulated because the routine is always changing and therefore you should get better results. Sounds good.

In order to begin the P90X routine you need to have a fairly good level of fitness as is stated in the videos. There is a fitness test you take and if you can meet all of the requirements then you should be in adequate condition to begin the program. I took the test and passed with flying colors except for one thing; the pull-ups.

Remember earlier, when I mentioned reminiscing about things I used to do in my twenties? Well, I used to be able to do pull ups and dips. While I could only do 7 pull ups and 7 dips, this is still quite respectable, especially for a woman as both exercises require tremendous upper body strength. Since I now have about 50 extra pounds I’m carrying around, pull-ups and dips are next to impossible. This isn’t an issue of not thinking positively enough, it’s an issue of weight to muscle ratio. I simple have too much weight and too little muscle to hoist myself off the ground no matter how much I visualize this happening. However, I know that I have the power to change this. I simply need to lose some fat and build some muscle. I’ve done it before so it can’t be that hard.

We had already purchased a pull-up bar in anticipation of starting the P90X program. It’s the kind that goes either inside of a door frame or on top of two opposing door frames. We mounted it on top of two opposing door frames as we felt it would have added support and there would be no chance of it coming down. It mounts by twisting the bar until the tension is great enough to hold it sturdily in place. Since the only portion of the test that I failed was the pull up portion, I decided to go ahead with the P90X program and instead of doing pull-ups I would just replace them initially will lat pull downs. Sounds like a plan.

In order to do lat pull-downs I would simply throw a rubber workout band over the bar, sit beneath it, and pull the band down towards my shoulders. I was part way into the routine alternating between push ups and lat pull downs and all was going well until I did something extremely stupid.

I wanted to get more resistance from the band I was using and so I kept backing up until I was about 6 or 7 feet away from the pull up bar. Can you see the problem? I just never thought that I’d be strong enough to pull the bar loose with just a rubber workout band. This thought never occurred to me but oh how I wish it had.

What happened next was truly one of the most painful things I’ve ever experienced. I was seated on my knees with my butt on my heels and began to pull the bands and this time there was adequate tension as I had moved away from the bar. It looked as if I was pulling back like how you would pull a sling shot. Then all of the sudden, the bar broke loose, came flying at me, smashed into my head, and knocked me on the floor. The sound it made was like a baseball bat hitting a baseball; one incredibly loud crack!

As I fell to the floor, I screamed and my husband came running in. The pain was so intense that it would be hard to describe. It brought tears to my eyes. I ended up with a very swollen forehead as the bar hit me on the left side of my head about an inch above the hairline. At first, only my forehead was swollen. Then the next day as the swelling moved down my face I had two black and swollen eyes. I had two black eyes for a couple of weeks as the swelling continued to move downward. My head was very sore from the severe blow. I still can’t believe I didn’t lose consciousness and fracture my skull. It’s possible that I did fracture my skull but other than the swelling and bruising and headache, I had no other real symptoms so it doesn’t appear that there’s any brain damage.

I’ve learned two things from this ordeal: one is that I have a really hard head, which I suspect my husband has known for years, and two, is that instead of making resolutions I’ve decided it’s best to simply make better decisions.

By always making the best decisions, I would have avoided ending up in a place where I needed a resolution. If I had made the best decision in regards to my fitness regime, I would have most likely realized that what I was doing might not have worked.

So rather than make any resolutions, I’ve distilled the whole process down to one thing: I’m simply going to make better decisions in the first place and try to avoid becoming a human target for a giant slingshot!