Never ever enough

Round numbers have a lot of appeal.  I imbue them with extra importance in my workout regimen, and big numbers divisible by ten somehow become gateways to greatness, benchmarks that will tell me when I am finally strong and powerful.

That feeling of hitting a new benchmark is great, but it never lasts.

I have been doing sets of 28 pushups for most of this year, from about April to August.  I realized that I had gotten in a rut and I decided to increase my frequency from working out 2 out of every 3 days to working out every day at the start of September.  At the start of October I increased all my rep counts by 10%, which put my pushups to 31 per set.

For so long I recall distinctly the idea in my head that 30 pushups a set is the amount a strong person would do.  When I got there, I thought, I would finally be big and strong and powerful.  That first set of 31 felt great, and there was a rush of triumph and a sense of real progress.  Two days later I went back to the gym and did 31 again, and my brain told me that seriously strong people do 40 pushups.  Maybe someday I would get there, but for now, I am not strong.

Talk about moving the goalposts!  I barely got 2 days of satisfaction and exhilaration at my progress and I was back to striving for another completely arbitrary goal.

This is just the way I am it would seem.  No matter the strength, no matter the size, I feel skinny.  I see muscular men out in the world and wish I had arms like they do.  Hell, I probably do have arms like many of them, but I just can't see it.

I knew all of this ahead of time.  This isn't the first time I have noted that my self perception doesn't change with my body, and my ideal appearance is unobtainable.  What surprised me was just how *fast* that transformation from celebration to inadequacy happened.  I figured I would get at least a couple of weeks of good feelings!

Working out is good for me though.  I need exercise and this is the only regimen that has ever stuck.  I am sure that working out hard has improved my mood and longevity, even though those changes are things I can't see or measure.  Given that, I might as well think of my neverending, unquenchable need for progress as a useful tool for getting me into the gym day after day.  It is foolish and puts my irrationality front and centre, but it does make my life better, so I might as well run with it.