An epic journey...

Welcome back to "I am a Masochist", the Ironman blog (redux). We'll see if I can come up with some new jokes the second time around.

Today is the first day of official Ironman training. I went to the gym today and did the prescribed workout. While I did the strength workout, I stared in the mirror, and looked at my soft, pale arms, and thought, "this does not look like a body that can cover 140.6 miles." Well, and that's the truth...it doesn't look like a body that can cover 140.6 miles because it is not.
My freshman English class just finished reading the Odyssey. One of the things that we talked about a great deal in the study of the Odyssey was the power of journeys. Our hero (no, I'm not saying I'm a hero for doing masochistic things, but stick with me for the rest of the analogy please) starts out unwilling, unworthy, or unable. Somehow, however, through the power of some sort of journey, the hero is transformed. He ends the journey as someone different and is able and worthy to do things that he was unable to do at the beginning of the story. The hero couldn't, I tell my students, have faced the challenge that he faces at the end of the story at the beginning of the story- it wouldn't make any sense- he wasn't fully realized. It is the journey that makes him into a hero, not the other way around.
Here's to the beginning of the journey (again).