Captain's Blog, Stardate 2012.10.21, Starship U.S.S. Enterprise - Rest, and the trickiness of this little four letter word

First off, let me apologize for the lack of updates since the last one, but I couldn't decide on which one of my many ideas I wanted to write about first. So, I chose to discuss the topic of rest first. The irony of which is not lost on me. Without further ado, let's just dive in.

Rest (noun)

definition: inactivity

Rest (noun)

definition: base, foundation

I think perhaps the uber* clever among us have already figured out where this post is going. For the others like myself, I shall continue writing.

The first thing I should say about this topic is that I am incredibly, unbelievably, and disastrously poor at this particular technique. I call this a technique because that's exactly what it is. Some are better at it than others. The following are a few examples where I fail at this task:

1) Always.

But seriously, a recent example would be the knee. I know that logically, growth and thereby recovery, happens during rest. If you constantly stress your muscles, without rest, there is no time to grow. Which means that for every ounce of strain you put your muscles through, you should give it at least a unit of rest, in order to allow it to repair itself stronger than before. Note that these are not actual units.

1 unit of strain + 1 unit of rest = growth = improvement = happiness = renewable energy = solution to everything 

I know that if I keep training on a bum knee, I'm adding to the strain units, and running a serious deficit on the rest units that it needs to heal. Logically. The problem being that sometimes, what we want to do, doesn't necessarily agree with the right thing to do. At all. Not even a little. So I put a bundle of cloth, tape, and metal around said knee and trained on it. And if you read the previous posts, immediately post injury, you will remember that the genius kept running on the injury anyway. And the doctor, verbalized a few choice words upon the level of intelligence of said genius.

At this point, until the MRI and whatever that will say, I have to "carefully" train on my knee, and "slowly" strengthen it, and to stop doing whatever I am doing if it "hurts". 

The truth is, I feel like if I just rest (inactivity) then I feel terrible, guilty even. I know this is not really smart and logically I know that. But feelings and emotions are just that, illogical. So this post is really me saying I know what the right thing to do is, and I will try to view the advised rest as building a foundation for future growth by letting it heal properly, and using the second definition over the first.

The fact of the matter is, we all need to decide for ourselves, when our resting falls under the first definition or the second. Sometimes, it is not easy to differentiate, and even less so to follow through. 

*sorry I don't know how to put in umlauts over the u.