Hot Air Balloon

I talk a lot about control. How I thrive on it. How everything I do depends on it. Riding shotgun with control in this wild journey I call life is confidence. Confidence is the wingman of control. Together they are a formidable pair. But control is nothing without confidence, and confidence without control can be a very dangerous thing.

Lately I have been banking some quality numbers on my Freestyle. I’m almost always within the desired range, or at least at an expected point depending on when I last tested. It’s nice to know that I can worry about normal things like my job, the guy that doesn’t know how to merge properly on the beltway, or when the weather is going to clear up so I can finally play a round of golf without being concerned about my Diabetes first. Now that’s not saying I am abandoning my primary objective of optimal Diabetes control, merely that when things are going well, Diabetes has a more silent say in the day-to-day grind instead of behaving like the immature child that cuts in line and screams for attention at every waking (and sometimes sleeping) moment. And I know as I’m typing this that I’m practically begging for Wilford to try and screw with me, but I guess that goes with the territory.

But as I tried to allude to in my intro, control is a lot more entertaining when it’s paired up with confidence. And while I still have a ways to go with building my self confidence, I’m writing this post to acknowledge that yes, I have miles to go, but I’m taking baby steps. Any progress is good progress as far as this is concerned.

A lot of this apparent progress has to do with exercise. I’m going to offer a fair warning to any eager-readers that aren’t a fan of self congratulatory back-patting, cause I’m about to inflate my ego to the size of a hot air balloon for the next paragraph. You have been warned…

All clear? OK.

I’m a f@cking beast. Seriously. I only weigh 155, but I will be bench pressing 300lbs by the end of summer. Belie’ Dat. The only cure for an hour of stop and go rush hour is taking all of my vengeance out on the bar. I know I wrote a post skewering the fools at the gym that do nothing but stare at themselves in the mirror. I’m not one of those fools. I come to do work, and if I have a few moments in between my own sets or spotting my dad…yea, I’ll flex the tricep. Do Somethin.

HULK SMASH!!!

Back to reality. I keep a notebook to record the weights for each of my sets, for each exercise. It helps to identify when I need to change my weights or reps when my muscles get bored with the current schedule and as a goal-oriented kind of person, it’s nice to see progress on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. At the peak of college, I was up to 295 on bench. Last August when I (re)took control of my health I was down to maybe 205. Now every day at the gym I’m showing a little improvement on my strength, and it feels great. The mild joy I get out of going to the gym is clearly spilling over to other aspects of my life. As I said, with Diabetes not dictating things it’s nice to worry about the mundane parts of life: like if there’s a rerun of CSI this week, or how many showings of Transformers 2 can I see in a 72 hour period.