It begins!

So I have been working out off and on for a while now… off and on meaning sparingly 1-2 times a week for months. In June I bought an Amazon deals voucher to register for the Spartan Beast adventure race on Dec. 8^th in Glen Rose, TX. $60 for an adventure race like this is a really good deal seeing as they start at $140ish usually. Amazon just happened to hit me on the right day as I was guilt tripping while seeing pic after pic from my parents at the Team Beachbody summit in Las Vegas. My stepdad(Craig) and my mom are 54 and 49 respectively and they started their first ever workout class/routine May of 2011 with an Insanity challenge. It’s an eight week program with $100 going to the person who loses the most weight% for male and female. They both won and have been going nonstop ever since. They have always been in decent shape…my mom more so than Craig…but now they are in the best shape of their lives obviously. Craig is running 5ks all of the time and they just started another Insanity challenge. Craig is instructing them and has ever since his second one.

Seeing the kind of dedication they have put in has guilt-tripped me many a time over the past year and Amazon caught me on one of those days. I talked to Will Lowry about it since he had done a Tough Mudder before (essentially the same race ran by a different company) and he said he would do it with me. He has always been in great shape since I have known him…playing soccer all of the time and that sort of thing. It wouldn’t take much for him to great ready for this race with a little extra conditioning over the coming months. I on the other hand would take a little more…actually a lot more dedication. Signing up for this race was supposed to be the motivation I needed to start training daily because I would need to in order to finish a race of this caliber…10-12 miles, plenty of obstacles, running through wooded hills, etc.

That was June. Right before my 4^th of July trip to Chicago (wedding and hanging out with Bing) I pulled a week of two-a-days. Getting up at 5am and doing some Insanity warm-up with a run or ab ripper X, going to work for 8-10 hours, then coming home to do a full Insanity workout. This routine made me feel great about myself but my body wasn’t quite recovering like I was used to…mainly my quads. I guess I am getting old. Naturally I had plans to keep up at least SOME working out up in Chicago as to not waste this beautiful week I had just put in. Of course that did not happen. So here I am telling you it has been off and on since then. The race is two months away and I have yet to show any kind of dedication to getting ready for this thing. What is my major malfunction?!

Last week I started again with a couple Insanity workouts (Cardio Power & Resistance & Cardio Recovery) a mile behind the house (Mon-Wed) and a trip to UH that included some swimming (finally) on Thursday. Now ever since I started working out again, or at least running a little, I have run a mile in 9-10 minutes…getting better over time (so I thought). This has been since 2010. So last week I ran a mile 3 times to the tune of 9:06, 9:07, and 9:11. I didn’t do anything Fri-Sun (which I had planned on doing something but was too lazy yet again) but started back up thankfully on Monday. Came home after 10 hours at the office and ran the same exact mile in 7:43. WTF? Apparently I have not been pushing myself…ever? Maybe the nicer weather? Maybe it was a fluke? Almost a minute and a half better fluke? Unlikely. Yesterday I made sure to try and recreate this seemingly amazing feat and ran one in 7:44.

This is my life in a nutshell. Doing everything at 75%. That kind of time decrease can only be explained by not pushing myself all those times previous over two years. No wonder why there was no real progress. If I wasn’t pushing myself then what the fuck was I doing running in the first place? Because I felt like I should or was supposed to be doing SOMETHING I guess. I really need to start putting 100% into my life here. Start doing things because I CAN not because I should or want to. There have been many contributing factors to living this lazy life. I have always told myself it was mainly because I have not had any real consequences to choosing this path. But maybe just because they are not seen by me doesn’t mean they are not there. Either that or I must assume that it will catch up with me at some point and I will enter a world of pain (losing my job at some point would be an example). I mean I realize now that in the end I am hurting myself and likely some family and friends along the way. Am I a masochist? Probably not and it only takes an additional 25% so it shouldn’t be some monumental task either. Just get up and do it.

A major problem has been lack of self-accountability. I hate to-do lists. I’ve never written down goals. I have never taken time to reflect on anything beyond the daily disappointments of not doing things that I told myself at the beginning of the day that I would do. It doesn’t take much for those thoughts to pass through and it’s onto the next day. I am hoping this blog will give me some of that self-accountability I so desperately need. The fact that this has taken an hour or so has been a big deterrent to me actually starting it… the initial investment of time and energy has often been a deterrent when failing to even start many endeavors…budgeting would be another example but we will get to that later. Now that it has started I imagine it taking less time. Here’s to hoping.

Good day.