I have been going to spinning classes during the week as part of my MS150 training, and there is one instructor who constantly has us do exercises and says things that really make me think about MS and what it means to people.

In the class last night, we were doing strength workouts designed to improve leg strength and aerobic capacity at the same time. That usually involves pedaling with high resistance and doing shorter duration intervals.

Towards the end of our last interval last night, he started talking about what it means to "quit" and what it means to "fail". Keep in mind that his comments are directed at healthy people, not people with physical limitations imposed by a disease, but I think some of it applies to everything we do as well.

What he did in the interval I am talking about is slowly build up the resistance we were pedaling against until we either wanted to quit or stand up to pedal. As we were doing that, he was saying that we can't know what we are capable of unless we are not afraid to fail. If we are afraid to fail and we quit instead, then all we will know is what we are "willing" to do, not what we are "capable" of doing. Basically, he was saying if we quit before we fail, then we are cheating ourselves out of learning what we truly are capable of.

Then he finally let us stand up to pedal, but he kept telling us to increase the resistance and not be afraid to fail. He turned out all the lights so you could barely see anybody else, and kept telling us about every 15 seconds to increase the resistance again. Finally, as everybody was really starting to struggle, he reiterated again not to be afraid to fail, and told us that the interval was over for each of us when we couldn't pedal anymore.

Then he went back to telling us to increase resistance about every 15 seconds. All you could hear was the music (an updated bluesy version of the old hymn "Solid Rock"), the sound of bikes squeaking and wheels turning erratically as people struggled to keep going. There were groans, lots of hard breathing, and slowly you heard the distinctive sound of bikes squealing as the wheels stopped against the resistance one by one.

All the way along, as I was struggling to keep going, all I was thinking about (besides how bad my legs hurt) was MS...and how it stops people from moving...how the resistance gets to be too much and eventually causes people to fail at what they are trying to do. And I couldn't help but wonder about people who are futher along than me and/or whose MS is worse than mine and what they have learned when they failed?

What lessons has MS taught you about yourself when you realized you couldn't do something anymore...or at least not the way you had before...and how did you adapt and find new ways in your lives? And what lessons have you learned when you tried to do something you thought you couldn't...and succeeded because you weren't afraid to fail?

Sorry if it is kind of a philosophical question and maybe digs at some old mental scars...but I am relatively new in MS compared to many of y'all and the whole experience last night was kind of eye opening for me and it kind of forced me to confront what my future might eventualy hold.