Tell us about your favourite way to get lost in a simple activity — running, chopping vegetables, folding laundry, whatever. What’s it like when you’re in “the zone”?
When I work out – bear with me – there is usually only one way I can push through a laborious session. If you are familiar with the notion of the ‘Revenge Fantasy’ then you’ll understand why I am all for the art of using pumped music and daydreams to help me get in and out of “the zone”.
It goes like this:
I’m big on movie scores. They can really tip the scale when it comes to me enjoying a film, because they’re just so intrinsic in guiding the emotions of a viewer during particular scenes. Once I’ve experienced a certain feeling towards a track my brain will hone in and connect to it by recreating a scene suited to the feeling.
As you can imagine this makes for a very interesting and intense work out. Instead of dance tracks if I am pushing for those extra calories on a cross trainer, I’ll have to stick on THE SIGNS playlist. One track in particular takes place during heightened scenes of peril and eventual resolution (always need a track with a crescendo to build and then release for a session), when I play these I can imagine myself in the scene – hell I may even make it more interesting:
*I’m a young woman, just tryna keep the little ones safe; they’re not my ‘little ones’, they’re probably orphans whose parents had sadly perished but we had chosen to unofficially adopt, because, well there is an invasion going on and they can’t fend for themselves.
The kids would have grown attached to us and therefore we would grow to love them…you get the point. ‘We’ is me and whatever hollywood hunk I like [at the time], at the moment it’s Liam Hemsworth. Then as the music gets more intense I envision us fighting the aliens off in the abandoned house we have sought solace in (aka Mel Gibsons house in the actual movie The Signs) and I get some crazy but amazingly badass idea to break away and run to the cabin just a few hundred yards across the field.
Why? Because during the madness we’ve discovered that water is the only way to kill these SOBs but the sprinklers in the old house are so old – and illogically the only way to turn them on is to go to the cabin and release the large iron switch – I didn’t say it had to make sense.
Anyway this part in particular gets me going: so I run, I run because I want to save my beautiful unofficially adoptive kids and my future husband Liam. I run, but I am chased by one of the aliens, there’s like four. Liam is in the hallway fighting and barely surviving ; the kids are being unhelpful but adorable by screaming under a table… or something. It’s up to me to save the day (music crescendo) I get to the cabin but I am whacked back; the alien’s freaky long limbs pin me to the shed.
Its not a fight I win easily (I have to add – I usually like to intercut scenes in my brain, what’s going on in the house and back to me in the field) I fight the beast off, and (music release) cut-to Liam: on his back, as an alien is millimetres away from piercing the skin between his clavicle, the the water comes. It pours people. Cut back to me – hand on the lever, looking exhausted and bruised but still gorgeous.
End Scene and end workout.
So yeah – music, an overactive imagination and a clear desire to be a superhero (the featured image above is actually the belt and mask I donned as a superhero for a kids show once upon a time) – this is not exclusive to one movie. I have Walk by the Foo Fighters as my go to superhero track ala Thor and the Inception soundtrack is a whole hour of cardio training/daydream fighting bad guys. It really works.
*This is the edited version – the length of the track allows for so much more backstory.
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