Why I Like to Be Sore

I guarantee that title makes no sense to most folks. Heck, it barely makes sense to me, but it is true. You see, I am a guy who has problems recognizing anything but time spent in the gym as exercise or even activity for that matter. If I didn't drive down to either the gym or the track and spent X minutes doing some form of "exercise", then I sluffed off that day. But the cold hard truth is, anything you do that is moving is good for you, and should be recognized as exercise in the broadest sense of the word.

Let's take for example this weekend. I don't go to school on Friday's this semester, and since I don't have a job yet, it makes it more or less a free day. I of course have to do some reading for school, but for the most part, I am on my own while Kathy is at work during the day. I had decided that for this semester, Friday afternoons would be spent going to the gym. Well this past Friday was the first one, and the day came and went, but no gym time for me. I had spent the morning cleaning the house, and then my cousins came down and we went to lunch. On my to do list for the weekend, I had decided the garage needed (to be read desperately needed) to be cleaned up. So I forsake the gym that day to spend the afternoon cleaning the garage. It became a gargantuan task taking 3 1/2 hours!

Long story short, it was not a "gym workout" but it was a workout nonetheless. Several trips up and down the attic latter, I took apart an old recliner to get to the big heavy metal frame so I could sell it for scrap (that was much harder to do than I envisioned when I started by the way). I completely rearranged my shelves based on the fact I now have a lockable cabinet in there that lots of top shelf stuff went into. So even though I was doing "exercise", it really didn't register to me as exercise, and I went to bed that night feeling like I had failed. But then, the next morning, holy canole!! I was so sore!! I had soreness from the tops of my shoulders to the bottoms of my calves! So it was only then that it occured to me, yup, I did do exercise, and had not actually sluffed off!

I guess I just took the longest way around to say it took some lactic acid to help get my mind right, and divert the feeling of failing to stick to my planned gym time as being a failure. I hope I learned it well enough to continue to understand that because it is not "gym" exercise doesn't mean it isn't exercise at all.