This Week At The Gym: Week 47, The Neutron Bug

I have some weird A/W (autumn / winter) bug that makes me want to give up any plans I might have had for the evening and go home to crawl into bed. I can't think at all, and the very thought of having to apply my will or intellect makes some reluctance hormone flow through my arteries. By Thursday evening I have seriously lost the will to live (henceforth LTWL: Lost The Will to Live). My heart says GO, but my body says NO.

It's not what I'm eating at lunchtime, and no, it's not because work is dull or boring, and I have a lifetime of practice at showing up for a life I've compromised my way into. I am always amazed at the way I try to blame my psychology, diet, work or anything else, for what is Mother Bloody Nature's fault. This is a Neutron Bug (it makes you feel weak but leaves no other outward symptoms) and I am not taking the blame for it. Nor am I going to let it make my decisions for me. I'm not sure what I do about hitting The Wall at three in the afternoon: the usual trick is to find something routine to do, put in the earphones and wait for it to pass. Catch is, I don't have a lot that's routine to do at the moment: all my projects require thinking at pretty much every stage and it's the thinking bit that suffers during an LTWL episode.

The reason I know that something is wrong is that my breathing is tight: four weeks ago, I aced two miles in just over sixteen minutes and now I can only keep the same pace up with a lot of heavy breathing and only for a mile-and-a-half. I nearly cut my usual Sunday trip to the gym last week, and I'm very glad I didn't. I put in a mile-and-a-half, twenty squats, fifteen push-ups and twenty sit-ups, followed by about twenty minutes of swimming. Not great, but way better than staying in bed. (Or maybe not, but we'll come to that in a while.)

I'm as up for Receiving Messages From Myself as the next new-age crystal-gazer, and there are usually a couple of days every year when I get the "don't even think of leaving the front door" message and since I'm coughing and blowing my nose frequently when it happens I accept those messages. No heroic showing up for work. This doesn't feel like that: it feels like I've just lost the will to live. That may be a sign I need to spend a few days in bed doing nothing, and, well, maybe I do. I can train hurt - or more to the point, I can train through a cough and cold. What I can't do, because very few people can, is train through LTWL hell. So maybe this is the but where I learn to train when mentally weak. And to show up at work, even if it's an hour late so I can drag my sorry ass out the door.

There is something going on in my soul about the life I'm living. I'm not denying that. But it's not the reason I get a case of the LTWL's. I have more frequently found that being pissed off with my circumstances can send me into the gym with the will to work out and hard. That, I think, is the other reason I'm assuming this is a Neutron Bug. I'm rather hoping that the very fact I've identified this as one of this year's A/W collection of bugs may let me beat it.