My Thoughts On Exercise

When you’re too tired to carry on, your body aches with every step, and your heart breaks with every beat, and your lungs burn with every agonizing breath you draw. When you find yourself at the end of your rope, you take solace in the idea: this can’t go on forever, right? You question the possibilities of an end as you force your tired body to continue. When your mind begins to contemplate the what ifs?—what if this never ends?, what if I continue to suffer?, what about the pain?, what if it never stops?—a deeper and more primitive part of the brain turns them off and forces you to focus on survival. But as you continue dragging yourself over the burning coals, you realize that with every step, you are getting closer and closer to  some sort of end. You find new vigor in this insight, and you suddenly are more than happy to suffer because you know that it will all be over soon, and that rest will come. The feeling isn’t quite so cliché as a “light at the end of the tunnel”. No, it’s much more powerful than that. It’s more comforting and simple, like if you take one more bite of your asparagus, you get a brownie. Two brownies. A hundred brownies. A hundred weed brownies. A hundred of the best weed brownies you’ve ever had, and then you get to sleep and watch TV in a leather chair forever. Such power comes from this gruesome truth: it will all be over soon. But your mind doesn’t let you think about the morbidity of your current situation. All you know is that however hurt you are now, however much you have to suffer, however much each second you wish you could die, it doesn’t matter because the end is near, and from where you’re standing, that’s a beautiful thing.