Aches and Pains

My body's mad at me lately for working out so much. I've been doing a lot of running, which is very good for my mental health, but again I'm faced with the pain of getting in shape. It reminds me of preseason for field hockey - well, it'd be similar if you mulitiplied this by a thousand, so that every muscle felt it. But my ankle's acting up again, like it does whenever I ask it to help me out, and my feet are getting really beaten up from new sneakers and treadmills and also doing karate on carpet.

But as much as I feel worn out, it's that feeling where you really want to keep going to see how strong you can get. I'm not so sure about my ankle- I may just be wearing out the muscles that managed to heal (though not so well, apparently) after I tore it apart a few years ago. But everything else has good pain - Jordan made the good point that soreness means you're getting stronger. How could that turn into a rhetorical statement, I wonder? I think you need to feel the effects of what you're doing in order to learn from them - if you don't acknowledge any of it, it may as well never have happened. Also, it's a sign that pain is often worth it, in all senses of the word - hurting from emotional or physical pain is what gets us stronger.

I'm also finding that I'm really excited to be part of a team again with this football thing. Granted, it's kind of stupid to make girls play football against each other, but I miss having a field and teammates to work with. It's different with riding, of course, and even though that's a team, each member isn't so heavily dependent on everyone else.

Lastly - in picking classes for next semester here, I'm finding that I'm afraid that I'll actually have to follow through on all of these classes. It looks like I'll most likely be taking calculus at 8 am 4 days a week, on top of bio and chem. I'd basically be living for an art class, but even then the art may not fit into my schedule and I'll have to take something else. That something else could be jazz history, which would be great, but I'm so scared that all of this thinking that I've done this past year will wear off if it doesn't amount to anything, to something new in 5 months. What happens if I'm still in the same place? I know it'll work out OK, but I'm also aware that I've been moving in a pretty specific direction in my head. I could be in the same place I am now next semester. Then what? I don't even want to think about it.