I also spent 8 hours on Saturday and another 4 hours on Sunday building a dry-stone wall in my back garden. My desire for the wall was greater than my fear of the pain, so I was able to push myself. It was much harder to push myself on Sunday and each row took longer and longer with more breaks between rows, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let some stupid auto-immune disease keep me from building a wall in my garden. That said, I don't know that I'd be able to push myself as hard if it was something I didn't want as much, or if I had to do it in cold damp weather. I can't live every day like this, but I push myself to have as many days like this as I can. It takes a lot of mental willpower, so on my bad days, I get very brain foggy and can't put sentences together sometime.
So--I was miserable and sore and couldn't bend, could barely tie my shoes, but it was race day today (my first one!) and I had made this commitment to a ton of people. I was determined to do this race, even if I had to crawl the bulk of the course. It was amazing that the adrenaline kicked in, the pain actually disappeared, and I found my running zone despite it being in the 80's, hellaciously humid, and a VERY hilly course. I finished 16th in my age group and 291st overall in a group of 700ish! I even felt good when I got home. Of course, the adrenaline ran out and the pain hit me like a brick wall about an hour later, and I sat like a lump for most of my mother's cook-out, but I am SO glad I did this today. It was so unbelievably hard mentally and physically, but I didn't let the course or the heat or my asthma or the frakkin' fibromyalgia beat me today.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-01 01:32 am (UTC)So--I was miserable and sore and couldn't bend, could barely tie my shoes, but it was race day today (my first one!) and I had made this commitment to a ton of people. I was determined to do this race, even if I had to crawl the bulk of the course. It was amazing that the adrenaline kicked in, the pain actually disappeared, and I found my running zone despite it being in the 80's, hellaciously humid, and a VERY hilly course. I finished 16th in my age group and 291st overall in a group of 700ish! I even felt good when I got home. Of course, the adrenaline ran out and the pain hit me like a brick wall about an hour later, and I sat like a lump for most of my mother's cook-out, but I am SO glad I did this today. It was so unbelievably hard mentally and physically, but I didn't let the course or the heat or my asthma or the frakkin' fibromyalgia beat me today.
It *can* be done.