BACK ON THE SADDLE AGAIN 💪🤠🤘

I RAN, MY BRUDDAH!

This is INSANE! HAHAHA

Not limped. Not hobbled. RAN.

Well, sort of, 10min+ miles 😂, my fellow runners would call that a fast walk HAHAHA— but bruh, just a few weeks ago, I couldn’t even walk right, so this is such a great victory.

It feels like I’ve been given part of my soul back.

The pain’s still there— toes are still pretty busted, the fracture on the foot is mostly painless now, and the ribs are still screaming if I breathe too deep— but I NEEDED this, so goddamn much.

Not only for the body, 'cause these last 3 months eating plenty of calories to support healing whilst doing basically nothing got me PLUMPED UP— I'm looking more like a hot dog eating competitor than a fitness coach HAHAHA— but for my mind, running gives me structure like nothing else.

Gives me that victory early in the morning that sets the tone for me to engage my day with intent.

Without my cardio— without any training, actually— I start to spiral. The chaos stacks. The fog builds. My bad decisions start to accumulate alongside that stacked ashtrey— it’s MENTAL HYGIENE. It’s where I level out. Where all the bullshit that the world wants us to believe simply doesn't matter anymore, only me against me, me against the iron. Where I come back to myself.

To make things even better, this weekend I was at a barbecue. Couple of my buddy’s kids were benching in the garage, and ever since the accident, although I tore some muscles on the side, and rear delts, screw up both my rotator cuffs, and badly damaged the tendons and ligaments aroung the entire shoulder joint— for some reason I had the intuition that the exact movement pattern of the bench press, was kinda preserved.

'Cause as I'm rehabbing my shoulders— which is going surprisingly well BTW, daily sessions of 5-15min, 4-8x a day with tons of shoulder rotation, partial hangs (I can't hang from the bar yet, so I do it with my foot on the ground), band rip aparts, and other overall basic shoulder mobilizations— and I already reestablished 95% of the range of motion, and now am already starting to bring the strength of the region back, although, like aforementioned, I can't even hang from the bar, lateral raises with 4kg are feeling as heavy as 20kg HAHHA, it's fucked up. But as I said, for some reason my front delts are still pretty damned strong, and I feel like the bench press muscles were all spared from the damage I've received.

So with a couple of heinekens of deinhibition within my brain, now that my ligaments and the shoulder isn't in pain 24/7, I thought — screw it, let’s see if I can at least bench the bar.

Bar: moved like air— with a smile on my face and 2 15yo knuckleheads as my spotters, threw another plate there— SOLID, 12 easy reps! HAHAHA

Threw another quarter there, managed to hit a set of 10— mind you, by the 6th rep my ribs started to scream at me— but the shoulder felt stable, everything was looking pretty dope, only felt a bit wonky reracking, kinda like the shoulder was about to move in a way it wasn't supposed to move (which tells me, I SHOULDN'T BE BENCHING YET HAHAHA).

But aye, being stupid, saying FUCK IT, let's try it, showed me that I can have hope, you know what I mean?

Somehow, all the heavy-ass powerlifting I did before the accident may have ARMORED ME THE FUCK UP!

We don’t need to be in perfect conditions to still fight.

We don’t need the stars to align.

We just need to decide that we’re not done yet.

If you see me limping toward the storm, pray for the storm.

We don’t quit.

We don’t cower.

We don’t wait for the perfect conditions.

WE STAND UP AND FIGHT!

'Cause as the poet Chucky D already said, "if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything— Harder than you think is a beautiful thing!"

BANG THAT IRON!

STAY ON THE IRON PATH, MY BRUDDAH!

Big KISS

THE POTATO MAN