broken. for real this time.

"I'm broooooken."

These words are commonly heard around our house. Matt and I are nothing if not dramatic about pain.

"Broken" can refer to the pain from any number of physical ailments, from paper cuts to sunburns to car wreck injuries to surgery recovery. But no matter how bad our current physical state is, you can bet we're whining to one another about how broooooken we are (and implicit in that statement is the fact that due to our brokenness, the other person needs to make dinner/walk the dog/get up and turn the lights off/fetch a glass of water/whatever is really hard to accomplish in a broken state).

But today? Today I am really broken. I even made a map of my brokenness to prove my point.

Yeah I know- I did that all by myself! Please appreciate how I mostly stayed in the lines.

If it's purple, it hurts. The darker purple, the more it hurts.

BROKEN.

Thankfully, today's current state of ultra-brokenness isn't due to any recent tragedies. Only a tragedy of judgment.

A few weeks ago I took a new class at the gym that was billed as a "high intensity interval training" class. Sounds good. Whatever, right? The class was pretty brutal. I remember being in excruciating pain for like 97% of it (in other words, 3% of the warm-up was bearable). I almost cried on my friend Tiffany's shoulder at the conclusion (and also faintly recall scolding her for dragging me there in the first place). 

But as the days passed and I regained my ability to walk again, I started liking the class. In retrospect. I was telling Matt all about it, incorporating some of the exercises we did into future workouts, and somewhere in my brain, I started thinking of the class in a rosy light. So last night I thought I'd do it again.

I'm guessing this is similar to surviving childbirth or something. You know it's the worst thing in the whole universe, but eventually the pain fades and at some point you start thinking you should do it again? Something like that.

But then you do it again and OH MY GOSH ARE YOU INSANE ARE YOU KIDDING ME WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THIS ON PURPOSE?!??!

Before class started, as we were gathering our materials, the instructor commented for the newbies (not me, I'm a veteran now, right?!) that this was a "tabata-style" workout. Hmmm. Tabata, you say? I've heard that word before. I seem to recall some really fit preppy bloggers preaching about Tabata. But I didn't really know what it was. I thought it was the brand name of some workout class or something. So I tucked the word away in my brain as class started, reminding myself to Google it later. If I could ever move again, that is, of course.

We'll fast-forward through 60 minutes of excruciating pain and tears, hating life and the instructor, and thinking that never ever exercising again and having to be featured on that TLC show about people who weigh 800 pounds and can't leave their hospital beds would PROBABLY BE PREFERABLE TO FINISHING THIS CLASS.

I did, though. Finish. I may never walk again, BUT I FINISHED.

After getting home, "I'm brooooken"-ing myself through dinner prep and dish duties, and collapsing onto the couch, I decided to Google Tabata. 

And for once in my life, Googling something actually made me feel a lot, LOT better about life.

Feel free to look it up yourself (or click the link above, it goes to the results page). According to...like, all the Google results, which we can summarize as EVERYONE ON EARTH, Tabata is basically the hardest workout method known to mankind. Like, look at those headlines! One of them says "Tabata- the four-minute workout that can replace your hour-long run." For SERIOUS?!?! Because let's be honest, I can only run for about....9 minutes. So do your fancy math and you'll see that I should only be able to Tabata for about 13 seconds.

BUT I SURVIVED AN HOUR-LONG TABATA CLASS!!!

Twice.

So you know what? I earned my 'broken' status this time. This is no stubbed toe. This is legit pain. I'm just clueless and dumb enough to have survived a workout WAY above my fitness-level and lived to tell...I'm proud of that.

So if you see me in a wheelchair, now you know why. If you want to experience a taste of the pain yourself, it looks like there are tons of Tabata videos available on YouTube for you to work out with. And if you're super ultra sadistic and want to suffer with me live and in person...I'll see you next Thursday at 5:30. If I can walk.