Fit Is The Goal

This is a very odd post, I’ll admit, but it explains a lot about me as a whole.
I find myself appallingly boring, and this next sentence might actually persuade you to think likewise.

I can’t listen to music. 

Really, I’ve tried. Sure, I like playing my violin every once and a while, but I can’t listen to music as any sort of background noise. When I’m working on something and need background noise, I put on an audiobook or a podcast about something I’m interested in, I like listening to something that I can absorb something through and music just does nothing for me these days. 
It’s been a steady decline in the last two years or so, I just don’t care for anything.
Even things I once loved I can’t listen to anymore. For the longest time it baffled me as to the reasoning to my sudden change. 

Tonight I figured out why.

I was lifting tonight as my workout, pretty much decided to tone down the Hulk workout a bit by subtracting about 20% of the weight on everything, but I couldn’t get into it. My body was tired, sure, I had a full workout this morning, but I was looking forward to lifting. I kept trying but my head wasn’t in it. I was fighting a wall of do not give a damn and I was losing. I stood there for a moment and I put my hands on my face and was rubbing my eyes when my arms accidentally knocked my headphones out.

Suddenly the world felt right. There was a complete lack of sound and it felt good.
I turned off my Mp3 player, tossed it aside and began working out again. I popped off the rest of my workout with a determination I didn’t know I had in me.

Afterwards, I decided to do this:

It’s about 10.5 miles or 16.9km for all of you on the metric system.

I did that after my heavy lifting and still felt like I could keep going.
And it was all done in silence.

Now, here’s my reasoning why.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a very emotional person. Comparatively to any of you, I could pretty much be categorized as Vulcan.
Sorry, my geek is showing, let me try that again.
Logic has always been my strong suit. My head likes solid facts, numbers, statistics and sets of data. It goes along well with my love of books and knowledge of all the things.
Emotions as a whole are something that I’m pretty much a toddler with. Base reactive emotions are there, but everything else feels very far away, kind of like remembering an emotion. It’s there, but not really.
Music is a very emotion based thing.
You listen to it and it will express something. Maybe a love song has you thinking of that significant other or make you pine for the feeling of another person at your side. Some music may incited you to emote things you’ve otherwise held inside, like punk music does for some and slow ballads does for others.
Whatever it it’s a feeling, and I…don’t really want that during my workouts.
When I work out, I want to feel nothing. At that point, I’m a machine capable of doing x amount of these movements with a ±y based on fatigue levels and time.
If anything, music is detrimental to my workout because it causes me to try and reach around inside my head in hopes of associating the song to something that is taking me away from my goal.
It’s kind of like…finding a light switch in the dark while in a room you’re not familiar with.
Make sense? 

And so, I am removing music from my workout.
When I ran, I actually didn’t even notice the miles going by because I went into my zen mode. I just did things and they were done. I knew where I was going and my body got me there. No thoughts no feelings. Just action.

So yeah, that was weird. I’m actually falling asleep at the keyboard as I type, so this probably isn’t the most coherent thing ever. But I wanted to say that this works for me. 
Because I’m weird.
Really weird.

This weird.