Accountability - No Excuses

"You must take personal responsibility.  You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself.  That is something you have charge of."  - Jim Rohn

It's pretty amazing how fast time can sneak by us.  Be it the hours in a day, days in a week or weeks in a month.  Somehow life keeps moving and we sometimes fall behind in the things that we have comitted to doing.  It took two separate people yesterday sending me texts saying that they missed the blog posts and wondered what had been going on.  Well I can sit here and say that I started a new job, have been traveling a lot and just purely did not have the time, but those are excuses...there's always an additional 10 minutes that I can find to help motivate the same people that motivate me on a daily basis.  So here it lies...me being held accountable.

In preparation for this week, I spent yesterday catching up at home.  I set up a very OCD organized home office, complete with a wall system that allowed me to use my newly purchased electric screwdriver (haha that's a completely different story, but lets say there might be a few extra holes in the wall given the serious power involved in this)!!  I finished laundry, cleaned up a bit and set my weekly goals so that I could wake up this morning and start fresh.

Because I'm still not able to sleep, I woke up at the crack of dawn and started in on some work stuff.  After spending the past week in Seattle with coworkers I had a lot to try and figure out.  Thankfully I have a pretty amazing team and they have helped me work through this transition.  At about 7am, I put on my sneakers and hit the ground running.  Although still on a very strict running regimen, I decided to do a run/walk mix for 3 miles.  In 28:34 (at a pace of 9:30), I finished those 3 miles.  Definitely not where I want to be BUT it's a step down the road of recovery.  Post run, I did all of my "at home leg workout" stuff that the PT has me doing.  Lunges, dead lifts, leg lifts, etc..I threw in a few abs and some push ups and there it was...my workout completed.

It's true that life can be an excuse at times as to why we are not doing certain things, but I am no longer making excuses...I'm holding myself accountable and am looking forward to both my recovery and some serious personal progress.  In fact, it appears that on 8/1 I will be part of a trial group for a new exercise program designed by a close friend of mine...I can't wait as it should be fun and a great experience.  Even better, I can't wait to share my results with everyone afterwards and have the opportunity to sell you all on this wonderful program!  Stay tuned...many updates to come on all of it!  In the meantime, please join me in holding ourselves accountable for our own personal successes and failures!

All Checked Off

It's AMAZING how good you can feel when you accomplish something!  How reaching a goal or completing a task can just bring a smile to your face.  Well I'm for sure a competitive person, even if it's just with myself and now with running on the back burner I have had to find other ways to experience that feeling of accomplishment and achievement.  As I said in my last post, I was creating a goal list daily to try and organize myself and get more done in those 24 hours.  Yesterday was day one and man did I accomplish quite a bit!

I woke up yesterday morning and decided to take a 30 minute walk outside just to get myself into the mode of work for the day.  Nothing really beats the sunshine and the fresh air first thing in the morning.  Throughout the day I was able to fit in a 30 minute bike ride, a bicep/tricep strength training session, two sets of the exercises the PT gave me (along with a little core work) and complete over 15,000 steps (my daily goal) on the FitBit.  I kicked butt at work, truly following up on everything I needed to do.  I was able to get some housework done, a small tan at the pool, grocery shopping, and even remembered to take my vitamins!  By 6pm I couldn't believe how much I had done and how great it felt!

After all of that I was able to join a friend for a walk at Wash Park with his three furry friends.  Now walking around Wash Park is fun all in of itself as there are SO many people to people watch.  It's a breeding ground for the "outside of the box" kind of people.  From rollerbladers, to volleyball players, to a string quartet and runners it is filled with so many different people from so many different walks of life.

But in true Heather fashion nothing is ever quite simple or as relaxing as it should be.  So these "three furry friends" are labrador retrievers...all of which are pretty strong and fast moving and fully grown.  Now imagine me, holding these three dogs by myself with a gigantic mastiff walking down the path towards us.  Now if you don't know how big a mastiff is, I suggest you google it.  This dog was AT LEAST 150lbs and would stand taller than me on his back legs.  As my friend had walked away momentarily and left me with the 3 labs, I'm now seeing this mastiff get closer and closer.  I don't know if I was more afraid the mastiff was going to snap at us, if the three labs were going to take off after him and leave me on my back with my feet in the air or if it was going to be an all out brawl.  But in that moment, I had all 3 labs sitting, their leashes clenched tightly in my hands and a sheer look of panic in my eyes.  The whole event ended up being very anti-climatic as the mastiff was super sweet, the owner completely friendly and the 3 labs so UNBELIEVABLY well behaved!  But for everyone else that could see my face, I'm sure it was quite the hysterical moment.  :)

So my point in all of this, because I become so easily distracted is that I found such happiness and accomplishment in creating that list yesterday.  I was able to get so much done that come the end of the day I was able to truly enjoy myself and not worry about what else I needed to get done.  So much so in fact that I was able to take in this fantastic sunset just as we were leaving the park!