I have talked about how growing up in California really makes you a weather wimp.
Another thing that makes me a wimp is when I workout two times in one day. My knee hurts.
But it's all good, and I just posted another Home Basic Jump Workout as an addendum to the original Home Volleyball Workouts post.
Putting these workout posts together has simply been an exercise in cut, paste, and format. I already knew I had MORE than enough material for an entire blog about workouts. What I began to realize is that -- WOW -- I had actually worked out SO MUCH over the course of the past fifteen years.
A lot of people who don't really know me will give me feedback, like, "You must workout all the time," and, "Good for you to be rewarded for all your hard work," and so forth. I have thanked them, but have also brushed off their compliments because I know how lazy and undisciplined I have been compared to others in my profession.
I'm taking back all of that narrative. I have worked REALLY hard!
Sure, it hasn't been at an Olympic level, and I drop in and out of workout schedules just as much as anybody else, but I have done something every off-season to show up to my semi-pro teams in semi-decent shape. I can at least say I have always been in the top half of the fitness levels at the start of every preseason.
There have been summers when I set a volleyball at least five hundred times per day.
There have been vacations when I ran and walked every single day.
There have been weeks and months when I pushed myself to new repetition totals and new modification challenges in exercises.
I have done A TON of workouts to get to where I am now, and, YES, it was worth it.
Worth it to now be living in Germany and house-bound during a global pandemic and government-enforced quarantine. ;)
These are just some of the things I have started to notice since being in quarantine for about a week now.
My emergency-response personality was a 100% reversion to my childhood personality. This wasn't a bad thing, and I don't mean a reversion like I started to act like I was ten. I mean that the more serious and analytical (and dramatic) personality that I had as a child came back out in full force. I didn't even know I could still feel that kind of intense stress and driving need to solve the problem at hand.
(I was a very serious and stressed-out kid. It didn't really have anything to do with my parents, that was just my personality. It is a huge part of the reason I have enjoyed adulthood so much more.)
I am glad I went into precocious-child-Christy-mode. It made me take the situation seriously and helped me facilitate the return of over ten players back to their homes. This was imperative to take action and more important than being silly or having fun.
Another interesting development is that my voice is totally fine because I have not been yelling as a player or coach for over a week. Good to know, that if I want to have healthier vocal chords, I just need to change my entire career.
I have also started thinking about personal rights, privacy, personal vs. government responsibility, and the impact we have as individuals and as a society.
Think about how quickly we gave up so many of our rights in order to "protect" ourselves and everyone else. (If people are being honest, they were mostly concerned with protecting themselves. Just look at how Americans have been "shopping" lately. Self-preservation at its finest right now. More on that in a later post.)
We have accepted the curfews and enforced quarantines as "necessary." Why? Because not enough people respected the situation by staying at home, and now we have to have rules.
I do not think we have acted wrongly by accepting these sanctions. What I do think about is how fast the governments were able to take over nearly every aspect of our lives on The Outside, and I am wondering if we will be given our rights and freedoms back as quickly as they were given up.
I do not say these things to create rebellion or unrest. But with a huge population under home-quarantine now, who gets to decide when and how it ends?
It is going to be interesting how our immediate and helpless dependency on our governments is going to be rewarded or punished later. I think it will end up being a mix of results.
However, one of the most beautiful things to grow out of making humans stay at home has been the huge breath of life the Earth has been able to take.
How insane is it that after only barely one to two weeks of humans ceasing normal activity, that the pollution we have trashed the atmosphere with would already begin to dissipate?
Marc and I figure that humanity really started strongly polluting the Earth around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Factories, mining, cars: all the good stuff. We really haven't let up manufacturing or production in at least one hundred and fifty years.
And in just a matter of a couple of weeks, we can see the bottom of the Venice Canals again. China and Italy are showing totally different pollution scans (although it seems like China is already back to pumping out the pollution again). Malta and Spain are also seeing the immediate impact, and I am sure the same will happen in large USA cities as more closures and lockdowns continue.
I am not an environmentalist and I do not have any political agenda regarding climate change. But we can all agree that pollution and waste are bad for the Earth. Convenient for us, but bad for our only home. We as humans have always been so destructive -- with ourselves, with our homes, and with our relationships -- but I hope that we can all learn to care a little bit more about how each of our decisions and actions really do impact our world and the future.
Ten-year-old Christy Swagerty would agree.
You can follow all of my daily updates during the CoVid-19 quarantine here.