slim buttons: April 2015

Thursday, April 30, 2015

Cutting Weight, Healing Leg: Part 2

I weighed 165.4 pounds this morning. I ate approximately 2,036 calories today, and burned approximately 880 calories doing exercise (Muay Thai - Saturdays are 4 real).

Leg: DID NOT GET HURT DOING MUAY THAI. But I only boxed, so. Bridges still to cross.

Wuwuuut! This is a feeling good entry. I hope it's not the only one!

So the thing about the days that feel good in training is that they feel GOOD. What it feels like is this: you have the quiet, contented, delighted exhilaration of having really pushed your body.

You have the equally amazing feeling--touch wood--of having gotten banged up and dinged up but NOT injured, which if you're like me is one of the best feelings you can have. It's like the moment on a downhill mountain bike ride, when you skid out but then get it back, and you laugh and you laugh.

That's... actually that's about it. There's a third thing, on days where training is hard and goes well, which is that after a couple of hours you are really hungry in a way that's pleasurable. But, alas, none of that for me today.

Not much to say--being happy, as has often been noted, makes me a lot less thoughtful and reflective. These workouts are grueling; that's great, they should be. Coach is being great about working around my leg, and everyone in the gym is pitching in a helpful, generous way. And I'm falling asleep as I write this.

So... rest. Don't worry: I'm sure I'll have some low-points soon, and write some really deep stuff.

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Cutting Weight, Healing Leg: Part 1

I weighed 165.4 pounds this morning. I ate approximately 1,951 calories today, and burned approximately 260 calories doing exercise (yoga).

My leg feels kind of tight, with a golf ball in the inner thigh muscle, just above the knee, but also pretty okay--getting better.

I'm going to try to write a short thing every day as I prep for a fight on May 9th. Each will be accompanied by a little video. The whole point is radical honesty, which means if I express some extreme-sounding feelings they should maybe taken with a grain of salt, as I'm just riffing. Also I am hungry. All the time: hungry.

Because I am going to be cutting weight, down from 165.4 this morning to fight at 160; and my leg got hurt again, NOT like the corked thigh that kiboshed everything last fall, but a contusion on the same thigh and it's just SO ANNOYING. It's annoying being hurt, and it makes you wonder why you'd do this: some thing that you are not particularly good at, that makes you be SO HUNGRY and DAMAGES YOU so you can't do other things.

I'm not actually as mad as those caps; not nearly. I'm trying to outline the logical train of what's going on with me, more generally.

It sucks to be cutting weight. I can feel my brain be less good; I'm tired in a sad, animal way that feels oriented towards survival during the lean winter months or some shit.

I'd also say, as I do in the video, that I don't write about all this to glorify or somehow perversely brag about it. You, reader, can believe that or not. I write about it because I think that it's interesting: that a thing whose extremes can feel so good, entails so much feeling bad, and what that means about things and effort and reward and happiness. I believe absolutely that there is often some pain/discomfort/unhappiness on the road to fulfillment; i.e. I have a kind of settled and (I'd say, based on my subjective experience, so maybe nonsensically but still I'd say it) empirical contempt for people who think that the point of things is just to be comfortable, particularly if they are sad but won't even go for, you know, long walks. But there are of course extremes, and fighting sports seem obviously to be at the far end of the extremes.

I don't have a ton of insight into why I do this. I'll be honest. I have many thoughts, and maybe some of them will come out over the course of these entries.

Let's see.