fit, happy
Fitness
Resolution
0Kraaavvvv how I love you. I am so tired right now that I could pass out on my desk, but it was worth it. Life is crazysauce, but if I make it through this week it might get slightly less so.
So I am of two minds when it comes to New Year’s resolutions. On the one hand, they’re very cliche and tend to be made and abandoned. On the other hand, I think there’s a lot of value in taking time to asses where my life is, and where it’s headed, and how I feel about it. I think goals are interesting to look back at through the year, even if things end up changing and they become less relevant or not doable. And if I’m halfway through the year and I see I’ve lost track of what I wanted to be doing, I can course-correct.
So anyway, I tried to set some reasonable new habit-goals for myself this year, but as usual I slightly overestimated what was reasonable and doable. First off, doing P90x every day, all the way through the program. This was a tentative goal that was dependent on my various broken parts, and on how well I could hold up to doing that on top of everything else I’m doing workout-wise. The result was that my foot did ok, as long as I didn’t do cardio stuff, and my shoulder was ok until I stacked a chest workout onto a Krav Maga day full of pushups and holding pads for a very big guy with very little control. But if you take out that, well…there’s a stretching workout, I think? So back to the drawing board. I may still do some of the workouts when I can, but I may just kick up my Taekwondo and/or Krav classes instead…depending on my work schedule, etc. The new job didn’t help with this one either, since my schedule’s been such a mess that my sleep schedule is nonexistent and I’m running pretty ragged whether or not I work out.
Another goal is/was blogging daily (or weekdaily, which is a term I just made up), or at least regularly. This one’s touch and go, but I’m not going to surrender just yet. This is also a new-job casualty, since I haven’t had a lot of time, and when I do I end up spending it doing something that requires less of my brain (hello, Netflix). All evidence to the contrary, I do try to write when I’m coherent enough to make SOME kind of sense.
In the end, I have a whole collection of other goals for the year, and some are going to go better than others. But whatever goals I may or may not accomplish, they give me some direction, and they make me stop and think about why I’m doing things. It’s very zen, but it’s been something that really raises my overall happiness level/sanity. I have a tendency to just keep driving ahead and forget to stop and look around and figure out what I’m doing and why. And in general, if I don’t make lists I get so much anxiety from trying to hold everything in my head that I forget half of it and don’t get the rest of it done.
So anyway, yay goals! I try not to be too philosophical, but I feel like I end up sounding very cheesy self-help-book-esque anyway, sorry. The goal thing really is helpful. It’s like gratitude journaling – it sounds like a very silly thing, but there’s research showing that it actually makes people significantly happier. Three things you’re grateful for, written down every day, equals a little happier life. So simple it shouldn’t work, but it does. Ditto for meditation – a lot of people (at least a lot of people I know) scoff at meditation, but studies show it’s ridiculously good for you – improved concentration, decreased anxiety, better memory, better health, there’s even evidence suggesting that it might extend your lifespan if done regularly, and a whole bunch of other stuff (I am going to be really lazy and not source all this, but if you are curious let me know and I can hook you up with sources. Real APA-published sources, not someguysawesomeblog.com links, I promise). And OH MY GOD DOG FINE I WILL LET YOU OUTSIDE NOW! COULDN’T YOU WAIT UNTIL I AM DONE WITH TWO MORE SENTENCES. SHEESH. PETS. Ahem. No wonder I don’t get anything done. Anyway, this last bit was mostly so I don’t feel quite so dumb writing about goals and being all “writing makes all my feels better!” Justification! Hooray!
Hope your goals are going well, and if they’re not, then join me in resolving to continue to try. If you don’t have some you should write some. And enjoy the ahh…type of precipitation or lack thereof currently at your house. If you live near me, then that means gorgeous fluffy snow which may or may not be gone by morning.
Productivity and a little futility
0Alright: I have excavated myself from the email black hole that I entered during the holidays, taken my RSS unread count down to zero (mostly by marking everything as read, not by actually reading, but even I can’t take in that much content), and knocked about 20 things off my ‘things I really need to do that I should have done last month’ list. I did most of these things at work – although not instead of *doing* work. It’s a fun fact about my job that I am often left waiting for other people to make decisions, and since my project is not high priority, sometimes I wait a long time. At the moment, things are actually moving along fairly well, but not in ways that I can help with, so I spent most of my day trying to be productive in other ways. Which only killed a couple of hours, but it was better than nothing. It’s amazing how long a day can seem when you have very little to do.
When I had finally escaped my cave of boredom, I had just enough time to cook, eat, walk the dog, and throw things in a bag and go to Taekwondo. When I got home, exhausted and needing an ice pack (foot still making itself known), I pretty much got absorbed by the couch while I considered how to balance the new workout scheme with my existing schedule. I think the upshot is that I need to adjust so that cardio workouts get replaced by my regular Taekwondo workouts, because otherwise my foot may give out or I may die. This will work to resolve both issues, since it keeps me from doubling up, and because the stock workouts made my foot rather unhappy. My foot likes a couple inches of mats underneath it when doing strenuous aerobic activity, and much less pushing off, thank you very much.
Also, in new developments, I finally found a job that: is part time; fits in my schedule and allows me to keep teaching Taekwondo; is related to my degree and will count as relevant experience in future; pays actual monies. I have probably held out too long waiting for this unicorn of part-time grad school jobs, but it seems to have paid off. The tricky bit is that my schedule will likely involve nights and/or weekends, and I don’t know which ones, or if I will need to shift all of my other schedules around this one. I can and will do that, but I am wondering a bit why I just sat around rethinking my schedule, when I may have to do it all from scratch tomorrow. But fear not – I may groan about having to juggle it all, but I’m really much happier when I’m busy. The worst thing about this foot injury has been all the sitting still.
Typing with shaky hands
0Oh man, have I mentioned that I’m really out of shape thanks to the foot saga? Because I am so very out of shape. I have kept myself under a very tight reign while my foot’s been recovering – the second it started to feel better, what I wanted to do was go work out like a crazy person, but fortunately part of my brain realized that was a bad idea, and it overruled the impulse. But it’s been a constant struggle, to feel ungainly and weak and generally lazy, while trying to remind myself that I wasn’t lazy so much as lame. Literally lame in the can’t walk sense, the other sense, well… I certainly won’t argue that my Doctor Who marathons are vying for anything like coolness. At any rate, I haven’t been able to do much of anything physical for a very long time. But I think I’m finally getting close, enough that I’m heading into some stereotypical New Year’s workouts and hoping for the best.
This means that I have now had a couple painful reminders of how out of shape I am. Although I have survived with less trouble than I initially feared, I am feeling a little wobbly after my latest workout. But it’s a good wobbly. It’s a kind of wet-noodle tiredness that I’ve missed. I have to do a lot of modifying (these workouts are the ones whose name contains numbers and letters that may or may not include p and 90 and x), because I cannot jump yet (I’m just happy to be walking, people!), but it still manages to be a challenge to my foot…but so far, so good. I also have a wonky shoulder from a couple years back, and it is going to take some babying as well. Basically, I am a gimp and a half, but I’ll make it work. It’s worth it to break a sweat.
In non-workout-related things, I go back to work tomorrow (one of the few perks of being a graduate assistant is that I get that long school holiday break again), which means I will have to try to switch my sleep schedule back around to normal hours. I think I have nocturnal DNA. But it will give me something to do and add structure to my days, which at this point isn’t a bad thing. Although I rearranged half my living space today, and organized piles of things that haven’t seen the light of day in months, so I haven’t been completely unproductive. Just don’t ask about my thesis, mmkay? Vacations are not meant to be spent on theses.
I went biking!
0Woo! Back in the (bike) saddle. After physical therapy today I decided it was time to try the bike again (I’m cleared for it by PT), as I was feeling fairly stir crazy. It went well, although the foot’s a little sore now so we’ll see how I feel tomorrow.
Regardless, the PT thinks that I’ve worked through the ‘chronic’ portion of the pain, and now it’s a matter of teaching my foot how to walk again, so there’s progress even if I do end up sore. If I hadn’t spent a couple days on my feet almost constantly last week I would be doing a little better, but it is what it is.