How We Learned to Enjoy Being Sore

I wrote this in response to someone else's post and it sort of stretched from a reply into something more deserving of it's own conversation. The biggest obstacle a lot of people face in sticking to a fitness plan is a pretty obvious one: Working out leaves you aching, if not in outright pain. Sore muscles, sore joints, and noticeable wear and tear on knees and feet. Take up running or hiking and, no matter how much you spend on shoes, you're going to have to deal with blisters. You start working out because you want to be in better shape, but after a few weeks or working out you feel ten years older and are almost always dealing with some sort of new pain. Why keep pushing if it involves so much misery?

Cheryl and I went from complete couch potatoes seven years ago to biking between 50 and 100 miles a week routinely. The thing to keep in mind is that the pain you feel when you start exercising isn't really from the exercise, it's from the time you spent not exercising all those years before. Eventually your body will catch up to your new routine and it won't be so bad. We can look back on early Facebook posts and see how we talked about being wiped out after a 7 mile bike ride, or a 3 mile hike. Now these distances don't strain us at all. Yes, there are diet and hydration and rest strategies you can use to make the soreness more tolerable, but the important thing to know when you take up serious exercise is that you will get stronger and tougher and more resilient. It's just not going to happen after a few weeks or months. It might be a year from now before you realize the difference. But if you stick with it, a few years from now workouts that wipe you out today won't even phase you. Cheryl and I use tracking software to keep up with the miles we log for our outdoor activity, and there's nothing as encouraging as looking back and seeing how much further and faster we can go today than we did even last year. It's sort of a video game effect. Can we beat our high score from last June by getting more miles logged this June? It also moves our fitness out of the subjective realm (it's tough to compare todays aches and pains to aches and pains we might have felt a few years ago), and into the objective realm of documenting what we can actually do today that we couldn't do seven years ago.

So, if you're just starting to work out and are feeling kind of sore, excellent. You're on the right path to feeling less sore in the future. But, even more, you can train yourself to be sore. If you aren't used to the pain of stressing your body with exercise, it can feel like something's going wrong. But, eventually you start to view all the little aches and pains not as evidence that you're doing something wrong, but as proof that you're doing something right.