Ow ow ow...

I've always been a runt. No amount of eating will make me fat, and no amount of exercise will make me stronger or give me more endurance. I hit a plateau pretty quickly and that's the end of it.

Yes, I've tried.

In the former case, I was once on a weeklong work cruise where the cook liked me and made sure I was very well fed. He seemed to take it as a personal failing on his part if I didn't eat. If I ever gained any measurable amount of weight, it was then - and it went away a week after the cruise ended. (Alas I forgot to weigh myself on the way off the boat, so now I'll never know how much it actually was.)

As for exercise, I once considered being a geologist. This included a couple field courses in Montana while I was in college. Unfortunately, it turned out that six weeks of mountain hiking for ten hours a day, six days a week, was not going to do anything other than make me miserable at the way everyone else gradually got faster at passing me. I did this twice in two different summers - just to confirm, like a good scientist should.

So I naturally settled into a nice, sedentary life of being in front of the computer all the time.

Then a chiropractor said, "You need to stop that."

So I bought an exercise book he recommended - Core Performance by Mark Verstegen - which I also highly recommend. While I've yet to become fit enough to start Verstegen's pre-beginner-level workout program (the one for the truly pathetic), there are a large number of individual exercises in it that even I can do. And with no equipment!

The first few weeks, my main goal was "to be able to touch my toes." Well, now I can do that when I'm warmed up. I also gained an invisible amount of muscles and discovered the true meaning of hunger. (And now my food bill seems to have doubled...).

Unfortunately, I seem to have reached some plateaus already. I don't seem to be getting any better at the exercises I'm already doing, and any time I try to add more of them, I wind up so sore the next day I can barely move.

Which brings me to the title of this post. I believe it was Thursday when I overexercised. Now it's Saturday. Ow ow ow...