Maybe this will motivate someone, maybe not, but thought id share

[410Stroker]

There is a lot of up and down here, but this is meant to be positive OVERALL.

I am not terribly young, but I have trained and trained HARD off and on for decades. Typically getting away from the gym when working 12-14 hour shifts and being on call all night for years, or doing yoyo shifts (Mon 6-230, Tues 330-midnight, Wed 8-430, thurs 2-1030pm, Fri 5-130) i worked that shift for a while and just let the tiredness form that be my excuse to leave.
But over the years id come back, work too much and quit, lather rinse repeat.
Made the decision to go back as im getting to old to be fat\strong guy, start training, have a bad slip and fall and blew my knee. Tried to work out around it, and I did some but the pain was crazy so i did a little, basically maintained as best I could, but things went downhill.
Got through months of rehab, got the clearance for the gym and light cardio, and went after it. Losing weight feeling better, knee still hurts but i can work with it, and im losing fat and building strength, then pandemic hits and the world closed down. I can at times suffer from depression issues, and there was a death in the family im watching my work evaporate and started eating too much again. Gym opened and I was there the minute i was off work, but now my knee was a lot better, so i went after it, at first 3 days a week just to have some recovery time, after a month i was at 5 days, and 2 weeks later 6 days a week.
I was fat and winded but damnit i was there doin it. I have heard people say "if you spend more than 60 seconds between sets, do NOT call it exercise because it isnt, you are pretending to train" for all those guys, F em, because i pushed but i was breathing stupid fast and could feel my pulse in my face and eyes and my vision was fuzzy, that doesnt sound safe to do another set like that, so i waited until things felt like workout normal, literally like 8 minutes, but i was doing it. I charted my progress, i was gaining strength, gaining reps, improving my times on the cardio machines and losing weight every week.
Started a fitness group chat with guys i work with, and we all were posting out progress.
Then in Febuary i woke up in a level of pain that was hard to describe, and ive had some terrible accidents and several broken bones over the years, and i could not move my left leg. I found from my doc that I had one of the worst possible sciatica pinches, caused swelling, throbbing pain down to my ankle and total numbness in my foot, id hit a point where my leg would lock and usually fall down, took me several minutes to stand up. None of the cardio options i found i could do due to the pain, im NOT putting those industrial strength pain meds that are addictive in my body, no way in hell, but i found a training specific for my type of nerve issue, that came with the caveat of "this will hurt really bad, but you will start to get better". Before i found that, my emotions were getting the better of me again about what felt like total futility, i try and something bad happens and so on. And packed the weight on. I gain weight easy both fat or muscular bulk, im the easy gainer type i get BIG pretty easy, definition is something else entirely. But i found that routine and remembered something I used to listen to when training, a song by Down called Ghosts Along the Mississippi, about a guy who bottomed out and had to just do the work to get himself right in the head to not have an early death (his issue was heroin, mine would be dying of fat). And im always the one who can push through something if there is a solid end, so i took that painfull training and ran with it. And started improving.
And in July i got back, and I rededicated my efforts into improving. From then to early January, i have lost over 50 pounds and still going, have gotten myself to almost hitting 50 rep sets of 135 on bench and my heavy sets have gone up 70 pounds in that time.
Now I am the unofficial trainer of the gym, the employees are kinda annoyed because there are literally6 or 8 people who dont bother with trainers but come to me for training tips, help for plateaus because "you're older than us and out gaining EVERYONE". I am in a far better mental state now, and am loving the training.Got my time between sets down a lot from that 8 minute, and the whole idea is just a little better each time, not looking for a huge goal that will take me a year to reach, just2 more reps next week. Cardio is .05 further or 3 seconds faster...things like that. It has been an amazing run, i got a long way to go but i have come a long way.

The Friday Jan7th, i started to feel like hell, no biggie i got bad seasonal sinus issues every year around now and constant allergies....then i got worse. Tested positive for covid. Did everything suppliment and whatnot wise the doc said to help and was feeling better until wednesday night, i fell down and couldnt breathe. Paramedics said i had hypothermia and was 92f, blood ox level was in the mid 70s and went to the ER, was on the highest amount of oxygen i could be without being intubated, the chest CT said i had several small clots and one in the artery between my lungs spilling over into both sides THE SIZE OF MY FIST and it was limitting my heart it couldnt beat fully and was bypassing. ER over night, 2 days in ICU before i came off of that monsterous air up the nose thing (40 liters per hour) down to a small one, then moved out of icu andn onto a small breather deal then off entirely in 2 days.
Im getting texts form one of my best buddies Chris saying "You arent giving up, you arent gonna die on me, i wont allow it" lol. The docs initially said i was going to need surgery, then the meds worked. And the worked well enough to surprise most of them. I was healing way faster than i should. So a different doc came in and started asking me things about fitness and diet. 1800 calories 240 grams of protein, 6 days 2-2.5 hours a day in the gym train until i might falldown every day, if i dont see stars im not pushing hard enough, and every day i have sets to failure, because it works for me so well. About this time a nurse was trying to stick me in the arm and said "im gonna have to find someplace else, this is not supposed to go into muscle and there is not enough skin and no fat on your arm to do this safely, you got WAY too much muscle for this" So i said Thankyou!
The doctor said "in no uncertain terms, the gym saved your life. You might not have made it out of the first night here if you werent training. Your lungs and heart are in great shape because of how hard you train, sure you are carrying some extra but that work is allowing your body to fight back and use the meds better than a vast majority of poeple. (this was day 5 when the discharged me) If you made it out of the first day, you would have been in surgery, you would still be in the ICU now and would be for another day or two, then you would have been here in the care facility for another week. So do everythying you can to get back on that horse as the gym saved your life. And if your wife doesnt like the huger time commitment you have there tell her that is the reason you are still here and every doctor here wants you to keep doing what you're doing.

I had some down time for recovery and yesterday was my first day back, have to check oxygen levels after every set but so far its super high, which is good. I feel like my progress got rolled back 6 months, but IM ALIVE AND IM BACK! And I got a fire in me to kill it at the gym harder than before, and the guys i met at the gym have all said something along the lines of, you are alive and thats what counts, you did it before you can do it again, and you helped all of us, so we will help train with you to get our "old man strength" back. (es a few guys call it that lol).

So i have gone through some **** but im STILL HERE! And I just look forward to training every day, weights and i found that the rower machine really helps my sciatica, so thats awesome. THE TRAINING AT THE GYM IS WHY IM ALIVE!!!!!!! SO maybe im not the best motivational speaker, lol definitely not, but this happened, my leg still hurt and i dgaf, im short on breath and i dgaf because im back. And its just training, which frankly is fun, hard as hell, but fun! So get out there, sweat your (fill in the blank here) off, lift to failure, do deadlifts until the stairs seem like a daunting idea, and realize that this is you protecting yourself, and if you catch this ****virus that it might just save your life!
Hopefully people can benefit from the positives, at least as i perceive them, from this.

And on that note, im off to the gym. Shoulder day.