I’m Going for Another Half…

This post was supposed to be published yesterday… but life got in the way… 

While I was trying to come up with a post for today (which I was struggling with… again…) I decided to go over the goals that I made for the year and see which ones I hadn’t made any progress on lately, or hadn’t done any updates on…  I realized that so far this year, I have only run in 2 races, not the 5 races that I had as a target.  I did mention that in my last fitness update, but I didn’t actually do anything about it…

So, I took a look at the list of races that I put in my old bullet journal and realized that there aren’t really any races over the summer…  How am I going to make progress on my goal if there aren’t any races to run?  Well, I have decided that I am going to go big and sign up for another half marathon in the fall.  I have completed 4 half marathons in my lifetime, but I haven’t ever beat the 2 hour mark that I set as a goal last year.  If I train really hard and make that 2 hour goal in October, I have made a deal with myself to count that as two races towards my 5 total, so then I’ll only be looking for 1 more race to squeeze in.  But, if I don’t beat the 2 hour mark, then I have to find 2 more races before the end of the year.  Am I crazy?

The Plan

If I am going to do this half marathon in 14 weeks, and do well at it, I better get training!

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June 2016 Health & Fitness Update (plus the Biggest Loser Results)

I know you have all be sitting on the edge of your seats since I posted that my husband and I were doing a biggest loser competition after we got back from our honeymoon.  So, who has won the $100 bet?  Well… I’ll let you know… but first I’m going to quickly go over my health & fitness goals…

Health & Fitness Goals

Oh, wait… I have nothing to update… because I haven’t done anything towards them!

That’s right… nothing to report.  I have doing some running, and playing some sports, and biking a lot more… but I haven’t registered for another race yet, let alone ran one… To be fair, I did injure my foot a few weeks ago, and have been slow to recover fully.  I’ve been doing some running, but every once in a while my foot pain flares up, and I have to take it easy…

Do you see the week and a half where I went away for work?

And to be totally honest, that one goal (to run 5 races) is really the only specific goal that I made relating to health & fitness.  My habit tracker goals include a few health & fitness related items, so maybe I should be combining those updates with this post?

In any case, I’m not feeling especially fit right now, even though I am filling my calendar with “fitness”.  And that’s probably because I’m not eating right, but that should change with my food journal experiment.

Biggest Loser Competition

So, now to the results you’ve all been waiting for… And the winner is…

April 2016 Health & Fitness Update

Last week while I was trying to get back in to the swing of my normal life, I took a bit of time to go over some of the posts I did before I went away on our honeymoon.  It made me realize that there are lots of things that I need to update on the blog, and also lots of things that I should get working on so I can say I’ve made progress on my goals for 2016.

So, first on the list, I’ll get an update on my health & fitness goals.

5 Races in 2016 (Goal #10)

Last time we checked in was in February, and I had just signed up for my first race of 2016.  Which turned out to be a bit harder than I expected, but I was happy with my result given the circumstances.   As I mentioned last week, I signed up for my second race of 2016, a 10k race.  Of course, while on my honeymoon I did not train, so we (my running buddy and I) didn’t expect much of a good result, but we ran it anyway, and completed it in a time of 1:09:34.  All things considered, that’s a pretty good time for us.  It’s only a minute slower than last year.  I really have to give my running buddy all the credit for keeping us going.  I was so tempted to stop running and just walk, thinking that there was no way we’d be able to do very good without much training, but she kept us going and didn’t want to stop and somehow we managed to run the entire thing (minus walking while drinking at the 3 water stations).  So that race is done, and we will move on to the next one.  Two races done, three more to go.

Map My Run

I’m still tracking my fitness with the map my run app, which I’ve already admitted is a bit of a duplicate to my habit tracker in my bullet journal, but I enjoy looking at the break downs of my runs and seeing if my pace improves.

The Joke was on Me…

This post was supposed to go up yesterday… but I’ve been home sick and so have had very little energy to do anything but the bare minimum, so no writing or publishing happened… Trying to get back on track today, so here it is… Better late than never… 

Remember on Thursday, when I said I had signed up for an 8k race that “I believe[d] to be a relatively flat course”… Yeah, so about that… it wasn’t very flat… In fact, after a quick little down hill at the start line and a couple hundred meters of nice flat along the water, the rest of the first 3 km of the race were pretty much all up hill… and not a slow hill… we are talking a big steep hill… for 3km… Yeah, the joke was on me for not researching the course better.

Add to that the fact that Thursday night (after I posted about the run), I started feeling a bit off… Slept really badly that night… I might have had a fever…  And the next morning I woke with a sore throat and had managed to come down with one of the nasty bugs that were going around.  Unfortunately, I was away for work, working at site, so I couldn’t just go back to bed and call in sick… Powered through working the morning, then started traveling home.  Anyway, the point I’m making is that my body decided to attempt to thwart my racing in Sunday’s race as well… but while I had a bit of a froggy voice and was not 100% I didn’t want to waste the entry fee, so I went and raced.

I am not a “runner”, or at least in my head I don’t feel like a “real runner.”  This was my first run organized by one of the local running clubs (vs one of the bigger local running events that have larger turnout and more “non-runners”), and I did feel a little out of place…  As an example, I got chatting with a couple of the women in line for the toilet before the race, and they were comparing brands of runners, discussing the different shapes and the amount of support…

February Health & Fitness Update

So, after my ho-hum post on Tuesday, I decided that I needed to actually do something towards one of my goals so I can post about it… (Having a blog really does increase the accountability factor…)

Goal #10 for 2016 is to run in 5 races this year.  As I mentioned, I ran in 3 races last year (you can see my results here), so running in 5 this year isn’t too big of a stretch, especially because I didn’t specify a distance.  But as of Tuesday, I hadn’t actually registered for any races.  I changed that, and have registered for my first race taking place this Sunday.  An 8k race on what I believe to be a relatively flat course.

I haven’t exactly been training, but I’ve been mostly keeping up with my goal of exercising 4-5 times per week (as we saw in my habit tracker update last week), so hopefully that will help me.

I’ve been keeping track of my fitness with the map my run app on my phone, which is a bit of a duplicate to my habit tracker, but it allows me to track more details.  (Though the calories are totally off because sometimes it calculates them, and sometimes it doesn’t, and I really don’t know how it does, so I don’t pay attention to that.)

2016 Goals #7, #8, #9 & #10

As I  mentioned in my last post, I’ve messed up my categorization of my goals for 2016 (compared to 2015), so this post will have the rest of my random personal goals for 2016.

Over the holidays, my sister shared this article with me:  If you’re 30% through your life, you’re likely 90% through your best relationships.  Though I followed the links there and found the original post here: The Tail End.

I found the article interesting, and eye opening, and the graphics were pretty mind-boggling.  If you don’t want to go over there and read the article, basically it is laying out visually, the amount of months, weeks or days that are contained in a 90 year life.  And it has fun by looking at your life in terms of other events, like number of US presidents or Superbowls or swims in the ocean…

But then it goes on to discuss how the 34 year old author only has about 300 days total left with his 60 year old parents (assuming they live until 90 and he continues with the approximate 10 days a year), which compared to the amount from his youth is only about 5% of his total in-person parent time left.  That doesn’t sound like much, does it?

Similarly, he discusses the amount of time left with his sisters (about 15%) and with his high school buddies (about 7%)… It’s an interesting concept to think about, and it got me wondering… How much time do I have left with my family and friends?  Am I making the best of it?

As I was thinking about that, I got to thinking about the different relationships with members of my extended family.  I have a coworker who is best-friends with her cousin, and they were each other’s maid of honour at their weddings.  (I guess technically, one was a matron, since one was married before the other.)  I live in the same city as most of my cousins, but I barely know them and don’t see them other than at large family functions.  To be fair, my coworker is the same age as her cousin, and the closest cousin to me in age is 8 years older than me and the next is 12 years younger than me… but still…

Anyway, this thinking has brought me to decide on my focus for 2016, which is relationships.  I want to nurture and grow my relationships, with a focus on my family and my longtime friends.  The ones that I may be in the “tail-end” of our time together. So I made two goals for 2016 relating to that:

2015 Goals in Review

I can’t believe that it is almost 2016 already.  2015 was a busy and exciting year for me.  I hope 2016 is a bit quieter, but I doubt it will be.  I already know of all sorts of exciting and fun things that are in the works, so I’m enjoying the down time this week.  (I have the week off work and am spending a lot of it at home, reading and puttering around my house.)

Anyway, I figure it is best to get my 2015 review done before the end of the year, so I’m going a bit off schedule of my regular Tuesday/Thursday posts (regular in that I’ve been trying for that schedule for about a month now…) and am posting my review today so that I can squeeze it in before the new year.

Last year, I started my blog off with 4 posts about the goals I had for 2015.  I did a bunch of somewhat mid-year reviews in August and September that pretty much covered everything… and I honestly haven’t done much since then to get any further on my goals, so if you read that, this won’t really contain anything new… and will be a quick summary of how I did with my 2015 goals.  I’ll talk about my new 2016 goals in another post, probably next week.

Financial Goals

First up, my financial goals.  In my initial financial goals post I made five goals.  I reviewed them all in August, but didn’t really make any major changes to them…

1. Budget:  I am really happy with how far we have come with our budgeting.  We keep track of our spending, and while we aren’t always super frugal, we have made good strides towards living a more frugal life.  The turning point for me was definitely finding the YNAB software.  I am a sucker for the built in graphs and reports.
2. Planned Spending:  I’m not sure if I should be proud of the accomplishment of saving up a bunch of money then spending it all… but we did it.  We had three big savings goals and though we haven’t actually spent all the education money yet, it’s there waiting to be spent.  If we add that all up we saved over $30,000 for our planned spending this year.  That’s pretty good savings.  Now we just need to put that towards more long term goals…
3. RRSP: I started the year with a vague goal for my RRSP contributions, and throughout the year I made changes to it… first to make it more concrete… and then when I reached that goal a few times, I increased it.  I’m happy to report that at this moment, my RRSP is over $50,000 so despite my low value when I did my review in August, I did manage to meet this goal!  YAY!
4. TFSA: Let’s just say this didn’t happen and move on, shall we?
5. Emergency Fund:  Originally this was a $10,000 goal, but with over spending in a few areas throughout the year, I decided to go smaller to start… and $3000 was the final goal… unfortunately, I only made it to $2500.  Better than nothing, but not there yet.

Professional Goals

Reading over my three original professional goals, they weren’t really specific enough, or very measurable…  (definitely not “SMART” goals), so it doesn’t surprise me that in my mid-year review, and even now, I don’t really feel that I’ve done well at these goals.

Fall Fitness Update

On Monday I promised that I would at least get an update on my fall fitness plan written and posted… so here it is…

How is my fall fitness plan going?  Well, the short answer is… it isn’t… but maybe that’s a little harsh…

But seriously, I just updated my sheet for the challenge… and I’ve only done 9 of 26 days so far… and 5 of those were my rest days (kind of cheating to call them “done”)…

Fall Fitness Challenge Results… so far…

You can see (or maybe I cut that part off in that photo…) that I did do a couple other forms of exercise in there… but not enough to make up for it.

I did however do the 8k race that I mentioned when I was updating my health & fitness goals.  In order to make up for my failure on the half marathon pace that I wanted to do, I decided to try and at least run the 8k race at the same pace that I had wanted to do the half marathon.  I figured it would be easier to keep the pace up for only 8k compared to the 21k of the half marathon.

Fall Fitness Plan

At the beginning of the month, I did a review of my health and fitness goals, and one of the things that came up from that review was that I wanted to put together another fitness challenge like the one I attempted to do in preparation for my wedding.  I actually had a lot of fun doing that one, when I actually did it… and it felt really good, so I spent some time making myself a new chart for the next month and a bit.

My schedule for work is going to be a bit chaotic, so I have attempted to take that in to account on the schedule.  I’m hoping that if I don’t “fail” because I scheduled something wrong with work, then I’m more likely to keep going… in theory, anyway…

My new chart starts today… But I slept in this morning (hence the lunchtime blog posting), so I missed my morning workout time, which means if I’m not going “fail” on day one, I’ll have to make some time tonight to do my exercises.  I made one change in exercises from my summer challenge, I got rid of the mountain climbers (I just don’t really like that exercise…) and replaced it with some leg raises.  Not sure if it will be as effective, but I’ll give it a try.

Health & Fitness and Misc. Goals Update

Last week I did an update on both my financial goals and my professional goals.  I had planned to have this post written to publish on Monday this week, but then I got sick… and all I managed to do all weekend was sit on my couch and watch Netflix.  Not super productive, but that’s about all my brain and body could handle.  Now that I’m all back to normal (or mostly), I figured I should finish up my goals review and update with my health & fitness goals and my miscellaneous goals.

Health & Fitness Goals

I had 6 goals originally when I made them back in December.  The first was to lose 15lbs by my wedding.  Well, my wedding has come and gone… and I definitely wasn’t down 15lbs from my post-Christmas weight, so that was a FAIL!  However, I did manage to get almost 10lbs down before the summer festivities started up… I don’t really want to put emphasis on weight, as I am constantly reminded that it is about feeling good and being healthy, not about the numbers on the scale, but I want to make myself a new goal of being back down to that 10lbs below post-Christmas 2014 before the end of this year.  I realize that means that I am putting my deadline right after one of the worst times for weight gain… but so be it.