Remember my weights logbook? I'm pretty sure the rest of the RJcanoeing girls do. Originally, I began using it during the first three months in NJcanoeing, conscientiously recording the details of every practice we had, but I left off once I transferred to RJC after the release of the 'A'Level results. I resurrected it when Huilin, the captain of the J2 team when we were in JC1, mentioned that ideally we ought to keep a logbook of the weights we were using to facilitate keeping track of our progress and so we wouldn't have to select random weights everytime we did a workout. So this logbook has been with me, and I've used it since.

It's filled with scribblings of my workouts and weights used, interspersed with random flashes of artistic brilliance courtesy of several of my teammates, who either used it as a platform to deride my affinity and overenthusiasm for fitness and exercise, or as a tool to profess their eligibility (and desperation) lest I happened to forget and leave my book in a random gym and someone (a desirable male, they hoped) would happen to chance across it. But unfortunately that didn't happen, and the book came with me over to Michigan, where I've been making great use of it- not so much for recording lifting workouts because I use the computers for that purpose, but more for writing down erg times for the rowing workouts that I've been doing.

You might have noticed the proliferation of motivational quotes on my blog of late, including my most recent entry which was comprised entirely of them. I've taken to scribbling some of my personal favorites at various intervals in my book, so that when I'm sitting on the erg, preparing for a workout, I can just flip through the pages and somehow garner inspiration from those words. It's pretty miraculous how a couple of words somehow gel together to form a phrase which you can glean strength from. The resounding nature and value of those sentences are just unmistakable, and personally I find that they help to reacquaint me with the nature of the task (or challenge) at hand, and enable me to focus.

I guess no one will ever be able to understand the apprehension that wells up within me at times especially when it comes to rowing, the challenges I find myself baulking at, the things I've to go through in the process of practice. And it's an everyday affair, it's not just a one-off occasion where you row till you pass out and go home and never come back again. Rather, I come back everyday for more, and more, and die everyday just to return and do it all over again. See, I know everyone will say it's plain stupid to do this to myself. But there are things I see in it that perhaps no one else will share. Sometimes I take a step back and I do think I'm insane. And occasionally when I stop to think about it, I can't for the life of me figure out why I do such things to myself. I never was like that before. It eludes me. But then the clouds clear from my thoughts and I realize that perhaps I can't define it, but to put it in the basest of terms, it's a challenge, a race to outdo myself. Pushing the limits beyond what I fathomed achievable for myself.

We'll see how it goes.