It's winter and it's cold. In winter mornings are very humbling. The nights are long, floor is cold and it sucks leaving house in dark. Getting morning paper involves a blast of cold air from front door that really motivates one to crawl back into bed. It's days like these that getting beyond duvet is hard. It's even harder to drag yourself through wintry morning to gym. It's kind of thing I think about before I go to bed. I think about it when I'm waking up and I really think about it when I am trudging through icy air en route to gym. But see that's problem. I think about it too much. Imagine if you could wake up every day with a clean slate and not remember bone shaking cold and wind chill. Imagine you could only retain positive memories of working out and improving your overall fitness. Then getting out of bed even on coldest, most miserable days, would be easy. Instead we have to fight tooth and nail to resist urge to go back to bed. It's our minds that want to be cozy.

I just finished working my quads on a weight machine. My head races and my body hums all in an attempt to lose weight. Only moments ago, my legs worked so hard that they began to fail. They worked so hard that my muscle tissue cried out in pain and began to tear. Now having just finished, my body sweating with effort, I can rest for a couple of minutes before doing it again.

Each day this week I will have targeted a different group of muscles. Each day I will work them, stretch them, and tear them. Each day, I will work so hard that my heart beats a new rhythm into my metabolism. Each day, my body will set to repair damage I have done in such manner that it does not happen again. Each day doggedly break my body down and force it to improve itself. This is working out, this is getting fit, this is what it takes.

As I sit and stretch between sets, my quads still reeling, I scan around gym. I take in those around me. At this hour, there are few people willing to brave cold mornings to make run to gym. There are two people working with some free weights near by. They are within earshot and while I am resting I listen to them complain about, work, relationships, their bosses, clothes, their bodies and their friends. The conversation flows from one topic to next seamlessly and it is clear by their candor that they know each other well; that they have been friends and work out buddies for a while. What grabs my attention however, is not meandering topics of their conversation, but fact that conversation is occurring at all.

I ponder this until I start on my second set. As my second set starts, all I can focus on is exercise; flexing my muscles against weight. During relatively short time it takes for me to run through my set and completely exhaust my quads, every action, every breath becomes an exercise in methodical control and economy. Every action I make is geared to exercise at hand.