My Training Plan for July, August and September…

I am planning to run in a half marathon in October… The one that I didn’t run in last year because I was sick… And didn’t train…

So this year I am going to train… so at least I’ll be prepared and will hopefully be able to work through a bug or sickness if one comes at the wrong time again… (I say this every year, and never really follow through, but I keep trying, so that’s something, right?  Maybe this year will be the one I actually complete a training plan… )  This is part of the reason for my focus on fitness in June, that didn’t end up very successful…

I’m two weeks in to the training plan, and I’ve already fallen behind, but that’s okay.  I’m going to persevere and try to do better.  As with everything I do these days, I made a spread in my bullet journal to lay out the training plan.  Here it is:

June Focus on Fitness Results

I bet you are wondering how my “focus on fitness” went in June, right?  Okay, maybe you aren’t, but I’m going to share with you anyway… 

June Focus: Fitness

In an effort to get back on track with the blog, and my life in general, I have decided to bring back the monthly focus that I had as a personal goal for 2017.

I have sort of successfully completed a focus for January (My Morning Routine) and for February (Realistic Expectations), but then I sort of fell off the monthly focus wagon… I don’t remember doing a focus for March, April or May… But that doesn’t mean I am going to give up completely on my goal.  I am going to jump in with a focus on fitness for June.

February Fitness Update

Just because I’ve given up my mini-fitness challenge for February and instead given myself a focus of decreasing stress and a challenge to relax and read for the month of February, doesn’t mean that I’m not wanting to keep up on my fitness.  Do you remember the running goal I made myself for 2017?

In case you missed my original personal goals post for 2017, I have signed up for a challenge to run 1000 km in 2017.  When I first posted about it, I had only been on 1 run, and so my total was 3.5 km.

After that, I can’t say I made huge progress, but since my normal running partner is super pregnant, and my back-up running buddy has had a couple issues with hamstring injuries, I’ve had to rely on my own personal motivation (not the best…) to get myself up in the mornings in time for a run.  Add to that we’ve had some very atypical weather for our area which brought snow and ice to our normally mild climate, I have had some difficulty getting out running…

But… That doesn’t mean I have made some progress… Let’s see my January calendar:

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!

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:

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.