The Kind of Week It Has Been.

Okay, so mixed results.

I had really good days Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Every day I worked and my work days were reasonable. Every day I went running, every day I did some writing, every day I read, every day I did yoga, every day I did some resistance training, every day I ate healthy and clean. Good days.

Yesterday, Thursday, I was worn the hell out. Tired all day. Sore. If I tried to do anything with my right arm that approximated a biceps curl, my arm simply refused to comply. Walking was not great on account of the tightness in my hips and calves; I logged almost 20 miles of trail running in three days and my body retaliated with quiet refusal.

That’s all okay. I too a recovery day yesterday. All I did was yoga and clean eating. After work I basically took a nap for like an hour and that’s okay.

Life is mostly about boom & bust cycles. Plus, this is a pattern in my life: I overdo it, which prevents me from doing it well. However, lately more and more I find solace in the political concept of the Overton Window. The real goal here is not to make stunning change all at once, but rather to drag the narrow window of the possible in the proper direction.

This is what it has always been like with my weight. It tends to fluctuate within a window of about 6 pounds. That has always seemed like a lot to me, but I have lived in this body long enough to simply know that is what this body does. So my goal is never to lose weight exactly, my goal is to drag that window of six pounds lower down the scale. Yesterday (while not running) I looked back through my journals from 2019 when I was living in Arizona, when I had time to run and go to the gym every single day. I consider this to be a time when I was in pretty good shape (or at least healthy) and my weight then was experiencing a heavier window than it is now. Granted I had somewhat more muscle then. I also went back through some very old pictures of me when I was in my early 20s and VERY heavy. I didn’t even recognize that guy. And I had to remind myself that I didn’t even start running until I was 30. 

There are times when I have to remind myself that all of life is a kind of Overton Window. Beyond the edges of the window is a person we don’t even know. My window no longer includes that short 250 pound guy with a mustache (what was I even thinking????).

I have made progress. Not just this week, not just this month, but since February when I decided I needed to develop a plan, that I needed to build a staircase I could start climbing up. I haven’t stopped climbing it, but yesterday I paused to take a breath. And that’s okay. 

Today I will start climbing again.

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Taking Stock: Week 3.

Okay, so where are we?

This is Tuesday of Week 3 of my Getting-My-Shit-Together Plan.

Last week was rough. I got my shot on Monday and I experienced a lot of fatigue as a side effect. Last week was also the time change which didn’t help with that. Also last Friday was a big high-stress event at work that I’d been preparing for for awhile and so work kind of ate my life. 

So not a great Week 2. But I still did SOME of my Get-My-Shit-Together things: I showered every morning (funny how that helps), I did my daily drawings every morning (find those on Instagram @standard_kink), I did three of five of these daily morning posts. I ate healthy almost every night.

The weekend was still too lazy, I still don’t have a good plan for the weekends. I spend most of Saturday thinking about the film “We Bought a Zoo” and making random Twitter posts about it for my four followers. I also cleaned up my herb garden by getting rid of anything that was dead and planting some new seeds (I also bought a couple more succulents at the grocery store) and did my family Zoom call on Sunday. So not a waste of a weekend, but still not as effective as I need weekends to be.

Yesterday was Monday and I worked and went to the doctor in the afternoon and that ate up so much time I didn’t get to run. The doctor gave me a referral to physical therapy for my shoulder, so that’s good, but I kind of don’t want to do that sort of frequent close-contact stuff until I get my second shot, so I’m not sure how to handle that yet.

Today work will be a lot of meetings and I just hope there is time in between to get things done. We are going to plan on going running right at 5pm when I clock off. That means I have to clock off at 5pm. With last week being all weird, I haven’t gotten to enjoy the upside of the later sunsets (ie: more running time), so hopefully that will start today.

That’s where I will focus this week: just getting out the door for those longer runs.

The one area where I have COMPLETELY failed is in the mornings. I’m supposed to be getting up at 6am and doing a half hour of yoga and I have been consistently not doing that. The mornings here have been just the right kind of cold where I can’t quite bring myself to crawl out of my nice warm bed. I’ve also been waking up tired because even though I get in bed on schedule at 10pm, I am not going to sleep. I blame the phone. I know! I know! No blue light in bed, but the thing is I haven’t been TIRED at 10pm. But that’s what the runs are for; you make the body that good kind of tired so it can drag the brain off to sleep.

Okay, so that is the stock taking today. Let’s see how this goes.

Sorry this blog post is boring, but I needed to write it.

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