It’s time for me to come clean about tattoos. No, I didn’t recently get a few. Hardly. It’s just as hard as I try, simply I don’t “get” them.

Especially their permanency.

Maybe I’m such a control freak that any form of immutability appalls me, but I don’t understand how so many people can be so confident that the way they feel about the tattoo today is the way they’ll feel about the tattoo tomorrow, let alone 15 years from now.

I write about not “getting” tattoos because I just read about something I do get. Ultramarathon running. No, I have never run longer than the marathon distance of 26.2 miles, and the last time I did occurred nearly 33 years ago.

But there are days when I ride my bike for four-plus hours, ingesting about a tenth of the carbs I should to force my body to burn fat. There are times when I’ll ride 30 miles or so after a race of that length to prepare for tougher ones.

And usually before I finish either type of ride, I crash full speed into a wall. It’s a figurative wall, of course, equal parts physical and mental, and the oddest thing happens.

It creates a type of high, a painfully pleasant hypnotic high that I’m hooked on.

So when I read an ESPN magazine article about the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon and how loving the feelings of physical and mental depletion and regeneration, as well as enjoying suffering makes ultra-endurance running the sport for you, I fully understood. In fact, if doctors would not have told me to stop pounding the pavement 33 years ago to keep from further damaging my knee caps (it’s a long story), I might be tempted to do an all-day desert run.

So what does all this insight into me get you? A way for you to do what you might be finding hard to do: work out regularly (or even at all) in the month of February.

In “The Waste Land,” Eliot writes “April is the cruelest month,” but he makes that statement about the emotionally numb who want to stay that way. If he wrote that poem about emotions and exercise, he would have changed the month to February, the one his Old English forefathers called Solmonath, which means the “mud month.”

The mud month turns your motivation to muck, makes you sick and tired of sweating indoors, and the cold temperatures and the slick roads keep you from doing so outdoors.

Without a doubt, February produces more fitness flunkies than any other month, maybe more than all the fair-weather months combined.

That’s why I urge you to find a copy of the December/January issue of ESPN magazine and read Kelaine Conochan’s article, “And Sometimes the Bear Eats You.” Let yourself get fully immersed in Mosi Smith’s attempt to finish the Badwater Ultramarathon to break his personal best by two hours, “despite the all-time worst heat” for the event, and you won’t feel as if your February workouts are performed in ankle-deep mud.

You’ll be rip-roaringly ready to go — despite the fact that Mosi Smith drops out of the race past the 90-mile mark.

That’s in part because of the way Conochan rationalizes it: “How many chances of greatness have you squandered by not going for it? How many times have you dialed back, erring on the side of mediocrity, simply because you’re afraid of failure?”

By virtue of the fact that you are reading this column, you probably “get” the importance of regular exercise. But I’d like you to forget, for a moment all the health benefits that exercise bestows upon you and focus on this: If you can link it to the same sort of love that Mosi Smith has found for ultra-endurance running, you make it so much more.

Here are some of the things I love about my forms of exercise:

How that feeling of “there’s no way I can do this” slowly dissipates as my hips ache and I pedal slowly through Palmerton and becomes a “maybe” somewhere past its outskirts. How that “maybe” magically morphs into a full-blown “I’m good to go” after one or two hill climbs that open up my legs, my lungs, and — most importantly — my mind.

How I can feel so good about taking a set of bench presses to the max — even though my current max for it — or any exercise, sadly — is nowhere near what it used to be. How I know that forcing up that last rep while fighting with all my might not to have it come crashing down is an honorable fight, albeit it a losing one waged against Father Time.

And finally, to keep from getting too philosophical, how it makes food taste better, a shower more cleansing, and relaxing on the sofa well-deserved.