It's not the having, it's the getting.
This is the piece of wisdom my fortune cookie had for me today.
If you were to dig through my wallet, you'd find a notable absence of money. But you'd also find a number of things with no practical purpose. A train ticket from Graz, Austria, dated the summer of 2006. An old, mangled train ticket from Stuttgart and a receipt from a lunch I ate in Maribor, Slovenia that same summer. A receipt from a money exchange at the Penrhosgarnedd Post Office in Bangor, Wales, dated May 2011.
I hang onto these things because they remind me of the things I've done. Who I was, how I've changed. And, yeah, they make me look like some awesome jet-setter, which I'm totally not. I wanted to be, once, before I realized that a simpler life is pretty nice and infinitely more favorable.
You'll also find, tucked in with the quarters I try to collect so that I can do my laundry every week, a few fortunes pulled from cookies over the years. There are hundreds of fortunes that I've thrown away, fortunes that don't resonate with me. But there have been a few that matter to me and give me a vision for the future.
This one has been added to the collection.
I've been talking a lot about the process lately. I've needed to. The plateau I've been on has been emotionally devastating, and even though I soldier on and keep going into the gym five days a week, it's hurt. I've beat myself up, mentally and physically, for not doing more. Not doing better. It's only within the past week that I've started to truly accept that as long as I keep going, I'm doing it right.
It's not the having, it's the getting.
Functionally, there's a reason that these plateaus happen. When we start a fitness program, it's a shock to the body. Here I was, an entirely sedentary person, suddenly spending upwards of an hour almost every day doing hard physical work. It demanded a lot of my body, and my body responded.
After several weeks, though, the body starts to adapt. There's a reason runners can finish a 5k and still be ready for more. It's not because they're magic. It's because their body has been trained to do the job more efficiently. So when I'd been at this for two months, my body had this stuff figured out. Lift this, push that, run on the treadmill. Repeat.
Plateaus suck, but they're also evidence that we've been doing something right.
Getting out of a plateau requires a change in game plan. I could have still made gains with business as usual, but they would have been small, uninspiring gains. In order to start to see measurable results again, I needed to find a new way to tax my muscles. Maybe find a new diet plan.
Bingo.
I started cross-training. I threw away my pursuit of a 13min mile and started visiting other machines for my cardio.
I also started a new diet plan, given to me by J last week, counting not only my calories but monitoring what percentage of those calories came from carbs, protein, and fat. The body uses each of these things differently, as fuel and for muscle-building. Paying attention to these ratios can be immensely beneficial in a fitness program. I use the FatSecret Calorie Counter app on my phone, to keep an eye on my intake and to help me make better choices.
And today, when I weighed in, I kicked that plateau right the hell outta here. The scale said 221.
My body will adapt again soon enough, and I'll need to rely on the process to see me through until I'm able to break the next plateau. But this was a timely reminder that it's all working out. It will all be okay.
Training tomorrow night. We haven't done legs in four weeks, so I doubt I'll be spared again. Wish me luck!
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