Why Rest?

If you like to exercise, you know that one of the most challenging days of the week is the rest day. Unless you are someone like David Goggins who doesn't believe in rest days, part of your training schedule includes at least one day a week where you do nothing. That's right, nothing.

Telling someone that does some kind of exercise each day that on this day you will rest can be a bit of a daunting task, even if you are trying to tell yourself to do nothing.

People get mad when other people don't listen to them but think about how many times you don't listen to yourself. You know you don't need to eat that extra snack at bedtime or have one more drink at the bar with your friends. You tell yourself you won't, but in the end, you do it anyway.

Why should other people listen to you if you don't listen to yourself? This is true even when the thing you are doing usually is good for you, like exercise.

The problem is, like anything else, too much exercise will wear you down. We all like to think that we are made of stone. That we are monsters of the gym or the ultra runner who will go that one more mile before quitting. So we push ourselves further, or we lift heavier weights. It feels good to challenge ourselves and push ourselves past the point where we thought we couldn't go.

We are all human in the end. We have to listen to ourselves or our bodies. We know what is good for us, and we need to put down that extra drink or not eat that extra scoop of ice cream. We even need not get up and run when every ounce of our body tells us we can do it. That we are lazy if we don't do it.

I'm writing this to try to convince myself that I don't need to work out today. I don't need to go out for a run or a bike ride. The lucky thing is that my bike is three hundred miles away in my garage. My running shoes are here, though. They are sitting by the door, waiting for me to put them on and go out.

They want to go out. It's their only job, and they want to do it, and I'm letting them down.

The problem is that if I go out on what's supposed to be my rest day, I won't recover properly, and I might see my overall performance suffer. So instead of going out for a run, I'm going to sit here and write this while waiting for everyone else to wake up.

It's something we all need to do sometimes. People often talk about procrastinating and not doing the things we are supposed to do, but sometimes it works the other way as well. We have to not do the things we really want to do.

It can be just as hard for us not to do something as it is for us to do something. Our brains are funny that way. Logic tells us all these things, and we often know what the right thing to do is, but we choose to do or not do the wrong things.

It's 8 am, and if I'm lucky, everyone will start waking up soon, and I will have to take care of my daughter, and my mind will move past wanting to work out.

Later in the day, I will want to eat something that I probably don't need to eat, and not eating that will be an even more challenging task. We are in southern California for my daughter's college graduation, and there is a lot of good food here. So I will probably eat some of it.

Luckily tomorrow, I get to run again. It will help with what I do today.