Where would you be without friends? The people to pick you up when you need lifting? We come from homes far from perfect so you end up almost parent and sibling to your friends - your own chosen family. There's nothing like a really loyal dependable good friend. Nothing.
I put on fifteen pounds of muscle so that was a lot of eating chicken and a high protein low-carb diet. Also a lot of heavy lifting and a very different kind of training with an ex-navy SEAL guy who wanted to kill me every time I got with him. In a good way.
The energy of the crowd is insane. Twenty thousand people. It's the biggest jolt of adrenaline. It's very hard to explain. You know the old story about the woman lifting the car off her kid? It's in that realm. You can actually hurt yourself and not know it.
Luckily my husband is my business partner as well as my life partner so I never had to do the heavy lifting alone literally or figuratively.