I am still sore from last weekend. I was in Jacksonville for four days. Two of those days started with a boot camp, exercise class with my daughter, Lauren (see big tires in photo above…) at Delta Life Fitness.

Exercise and Recovery…

The class began with a couple of laps around a parking lot and took place in a garage with no air-conditioning and a floor made of what looked and felt like asphalt and rubber mixed in a blender. Impeccably clean, requisite cheerful instructor with a headset, torture implements arranged in tableaus along the walls, waiting…

I had that moment where I thought, What am I DOING here? and Can I fake an Achilles heal excuse? And of course my head was full of all the negatives – there was no way I could do this high impact workout. No way. My God I must be thirty years older than everyone here! Why did Lauren think I could do this?  (Yes my head even played the age card and rounded up! Shame on my brain!)

And of course it made me think of recovery from addiction. How hard I made  sobriety seem in my own head, before I made the commitment. How impossible it seemed, until it was done…

Try, Try Again

Speaking of hard,  the first day, first exercise consisted of grabbing hold of two enormous ropes tethered to a wall. They weighed approximately five hundred pounds. The drill was to flip the ropes like reins on lazy carriage horses while (get this) genuflecting on one leg and then the other in deep lunges.

The music was good. And there were inspirational aphorisms on the wall. The instructor seemed kind. I made it. And on to the next station, where we had to do a sort of hop-skip-step onto a box, a la old-school step aerobics. Hey, I can do this… it’s hard, but it’s not impossible… Lunge, pushup. squat, kettlebell lift, lean and squat some more… Encouraging words from the instructor, “Good Marilyn!” “You got up this morning to work! Make it count!”

It’s the SAME…

How many times do I have to be reminded before it sinks in? Recovery is just like a boot camp style, exercise class. Like a rigorous hike up a steep hill. It’s hard but doable. If you don’t succeed the first time, try again. Learn from your missteps. Dig deep and make it count. Good Marilyn!

Changing one’s life for the better is never an easy process. If it were, we would all be our very best selves, all the time. Making a better life, a more successful life is hard, but not impossible.

 And I am always impressed by those who just keep trying…

The post If at First You Don’t Succeed, Fix Your Ponytail and Try Again… first appeared on Waking Up The Ghost - Alcohol Recovery.