Battle Scars

When I was a little kid my dad used to tell me to be proud of my battle scars. It somehow made the fact that I just totally wiped out on my bike on the freshly poured tar and graveled road, skinning up both knees and elbows seem a little bit better... possibly even cool. It made me stop looking at my bloody knees as...well...painful bloody knees...but they were now symbolic of my daring personality, a trophy of the summer day spent riding my pink huffy through the streets of Gillespie.

I don't think I posted this here but I've sustained yet another injury at the gym. I'm not quite sure how it happened but a couple weeks ago I workout out in the evening and the next morning when getting out of bed I had pain in my foot as soon as I stepped out. I had to do the kind of limp-and-drag thing until my muscles got warmed up a little. If I would sit still for any amount of time it would take some time before I could walk normally again.

I talked to my trainer about this and he suggested I take a couple weeks off from the crosstrainer to heal and see how it goes from there. I initially panicked. What in the hell was I going to do with no crosstrainer for 2 weeks! Walking on the treadmill gave me the same pain in my foot so that was out. I hate the bike it makes my arse go numb almost instantly and I just don't feel like I'm doing anything. So I turned to the next best apparatus in the gym... the row machine.

I had tried the row machine before when I first started at the gym and it hurt my hands so I couldn't do it very long and eventually just forgot about it all together. Well now that I had no other alternatives it looked like me and that little "boat" were gonna be good friends for a while.

It turns out I freaking LOVE the row machine. I really have to concentrate to keep my form right and it makes the time fly by. Plus I can pretend I am in one of Amsterdam's beautiful canals racing right along side all the other athletes. We live really close to the Amstel canal and I constantly see teams of people rowing down through the water as their coaches ride bikes along side yelling instructions through their megaphones... now I feel like I'm one of them! It's an awesome leg and back workout and just mixing it up a little makes a huge difference in my gym time.

The downfall to the machine is the 3 huge blisters/calluses it gives me on my hands. As I was rubbing them last night after my workout I thought about all my little battle scars I've earned through my life. I thought that as I grew up those scars would become a thing of the past. Obviously I was wrong.

So, ya wanna see my cool new scar?