Pain

Went training tonight, even though my stomach was feeling as if it was gripped by a fist and was being twisted by a particulary evil bastard. I've had stomach and digestive problems for a year now and it has had a real negative impact on my quality of life over that period. It comes and goes throughout the week, some days it just feels like I have a frog in my throat, on bad days like today, I feel sick, lethargic and generally like the last thing I want to do is visit the school to put some physical and mental effort in.

I'm back home now, I only did the first session of what should have been nearly an hour and a half of training, it was a real focus session tonight on some basic techniques,the effort required though to get them spot on, with the right attention to detail but still with power and commitment really took it out of me.

It's nights like this where I feel the old spark and wish I could go that bit further but the pain gets to you, wears you down, makes you that little bit of a quitter. Perhaps I could have stayed a bit longer, but all I could think about was coming home, sitting down and completely relaxing. To the Stewart of 2 years ago that would have been unacceptable, 2 years ago I would have blitzed through the class, come home, carried out some stretches and some conditioning reps, planned out the next days activities against my training plan, that Stewart would look at me and say "quitter, you just don't want it enough!" But I'm not that person, I've had to modify what I can achieve to fit around the days where I do feel like I want to throw up. The good days are awesome, I have used physical activity to help tune out the discomfort when it's not so acute, running helps to focus on something else apart from how I'm feeling physically.

Pain is something lots of people live with every day, mine is more annoying discomfort, but it's been enough that it has left a mark on me, some days I look and feel older than I am, some days there is no drive, no will to achieve anything, luckily this isn't every day. Next week I go to the hospital for another exploratory procedure, hopefully this will move me one step closer to getting back to a more normal state.

Tomorrow I hope is one of the good days.