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Thursday, August 2, 2012

How to Become a Beast

Two days ago, I ran a marathon on the treadmill.... one of the worst decisions in my life, second to running a 50 miler with a month of training.  Yesterday, I just worked out at the gym only for a little bit.  Today, I went to the gym did 20 pull ups, 54 push ups, and then cycled for an hour before stretching and then going to play indoor soccer.  I played hard for the time that I was out there, and although I thought that the marathon would have affected my stamina, I found out that my stamina wasn't too affected by the marathon.  This meant that the marathon that I ran was not at my 'best' (probably because I ran the day before, making it so that I didn't feel like pushing hard during the marathon).  Because I prepared beforehand and brought a lot of drinks, I wasn't dehydrated nor lost salt, but I was getting closer to losing energy from carbs.  I managed to get through without going through my glycogen storage, but I was pretty close.  As soon as I went back, I ate a lot of food in order to replenish myself and recover as much as I could, and the next day, I was fine.

Now normally, when a person does a marathon, the glycogen storage is depleted, and the individual is usually dehydrated and doesn't have enough salt in his/her system, but in my case, it was different.  I made sure to prepare for it, and accidentally didn't push myself to a point where I wouldn't be able to recover.  Considering that I'm training for a 5k, this might be a little extreme, but it certainly showed me that I'm ready to tackle almost anything.  I have the stamina it takes to run long distances.  I'm building speed to run the short races.  As today, I played a lot of soccer, I really pushed myself to improve my speed.  It feels so good to be able to run as fast as you can, to challenge another person, to get in the way, to force people to make mistakes, to reach long passes, and to score goals.  All these things help me push my body to run fast, to take it up a notch.

How do you reach that?  Do you one day wake up and find yourself able to run marathons and play soccer back to back?  No.  A lot of work needs to be put into it, and the lifestyle of the individual must be geared towards being able to do all that work.  Dedication is what brings you to that point.  When you keep on pushing yourself, your body adapts to your lifestyle and choices, and little by little, begins to shape and becomes something stronger.  Just as every pound from the blacksmith's hammer strengthens the sword, each day of training strengthens the individual as he or she grows.  To become a beast, you must train like a beast.  When you have a goal and you run towards it, the chances of you making it is considerably higher than when you're only half-heartedly going for it.  Keep on strengthening yourself in the proper way and you can become a beast.  It doesn't matter if it's a physical beast, or just a working beast.  If you really want to become a beast, you'll get there because you'll push and shove til you  reach that point.

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