Sometimes fear makes you unstoppable

I took a trip to the emergency room the other week and it scared the hell out of me. I was at my work computer when all of a sudden it became unrecognizable. I was texting with a friend who is an EMT and told him what was going on. I had partial but not all symptoms of a stroke and he suggested I go get checked out. Everything made me dizzy, my extremities were tingling, I had extreme pain shooting through my head. I didn't know how to get up. My speech pattern was stupefied. I was terrified.

I was given medicine through an IV and for three hours I had no headache and I was exhausted. The one thing that is always repeated to me is that if I lost weight the headache disorder could possibly go away all together. With the amount I had lost previously and was managing to maintain, the pain from the initial diagnosis to now had lessened. I knew I needed to take things seriously again.

I'm still not motivated to run. I think and daydream about running in cold wet weather on the trails in Saratoga State Park but right now those are just daydreams.

I do things because they scare the hell out of me. That is what made me sign up for my first half marathon.  So I signed up for a Boot Camp class at Hudson Valley Community College. It's at 6am every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I was (and still am) scared that I'll suck so badly. That I won't be able to complete everything. That I'll be the last "kid" in the group. Some of those fears were totally there this morning.

However, the instructor is awesome and saw the two new people in the class and was great checking in with us and watching our form. This morning was a fitness test so we could get our starting point numbers. 3 minute step test (fuck you stadium stairs), 8 sets of .20sec lunge press sets with an 8 pound weight, stability T pose, laps around the track, planks, jog to the flag pole, push-offs, and more step ups, followed by jog back to the room.

My asthmatic lungs are feeling it hard. My legs are feeling it too. The instructor also took our body measurements and our body fat percentages and because I suck at finding my pulse I have to do resting heart rate tomorrow (I found an app that uses the camera & flash on your iphone to get your pulse)

Wednesday is a push up test (probably sit ups too). Push ups are why I am taking this class. I was right at 50 push ups in one minute before my accident. I would like to be on my way of getting back there. Right now doing 7 modified push ups tire out my shoulder.

So I might not be writing about running as much but I'll still have something to talk about. I know a lot of my friends are like me, not really loving the idea of taking a class and being around all these other people exercising. In the back of my mind, I want to be able to run a Turkey Trot this year but I'm not going to marry myself to that idea yet. For now,  I'm just going to keep lunging forward and keep stepping up.