Week 3

    So for my third week I'm going to try a new thing where I have a little comment from each day. Kinda like a journal entry type blurb. At the end of the week I'll do a wrap up paragraph of the week. We'll see how this goes.

Sunday: This morning was harder than the others. Mainly because I stayed up late and then was woken up at 1:00 am by my mother yelling. She, my stepdad, and some of their friends were playing World of Warcraft and she gets very excited and also very angry when things don't go her way in the game. Now, I am not a light sleeper, so the fact that she woke me up is pretty telling of how loud she was. So I didn't get a lot of sleep and I woke up at 5:00 when the light came on but I just turned over and went back to sleep for another hour. I finally had to get up to pee and eat around 6:30 because my body insisted. Then after a short morning meditation and scripture study I took an early morning nap. I didn't have any workout planned for today because it's my rest day, which is fitting because it's the sabbath, the day of rest.

Monday: Monday's suck! Granted I didn't have to get up this morning and go into work, but I did.  My boss offered an optional, short shift for anyone who wanted to get paid overtime and wanted to make tomorrow a little less horrible. Being closed on a Monday means filling Monday's and Tuesday's orders on Tuesday and it's just not worth the three day weekend. I also did it because I knew I had plans to get up and workout so I figured I might as well, I'm up anyways and I have no other plans for the day. Today my self love exercise was to go through all of my clothes and get rid of the ones that I don't wear/don't fit. I've got two empty drawers in my dresser and half my closet. I threw away some things like socks and ripped clothing, but I've got a laundry basket overflowing with things to be donated. It is quite freeing to just toss a bunch of stuff. My next project will be clearing out all of the non clothing items from my closet and creating a space for storage.

Tuesday: Tuesday was a day man. As I was getting ready for my morning run my mother got up and informed me that we had a weather watch that was put into effect the night before after I'd gone to bed. I just kinda shrugged her off and went on my run anyway. It wasn't bad other than the fact that the temperature had dropped roughly 40 degrees overnight and it was pretty windy. So I finished my run and went to work and then the power went out because the wind took out power lines all around the city. At work the lights flickered a few times but the power stayed on all day. After getting home I learned that our fence was destroyed, our garden flattened, and the neighbors dree had lost a large limb that blocked the road for a while. We got hit with the softer end of the storm. Cities to the north of us were struck with winds over 90mph. Someone said it was the equivalent of a hurricane without the rain. We had a sorta hurricane in a desert, nowhere near the ocean. 

Wednesday: Today wasn't that exciting. I have friends and coworkers who are still without power. Out power came back on around 10:30 last night. I didn't have my light this morning because the power outage caused the timer to be off so it actually came on at around 8:00 pm instead of 5:00 am. I reset it tonight and it should go on tomorrow morning at 5 but we'll see. 

Thursday: My run today was awesome! I tried running with a mask to help keep my throat from being irritated by the cold air and it worked. Well, it worked for a little bit. I need to find a different mask because when I breathed in the mask I was wearing would go in my mouth and then my brain panicked because it thought I'd suffocate.  Spoiler: I didn't suffocate. 

    I'm working on slowly increasing the amount of time that I can continuously run without stopping. Last week I started off with running for 1 minute followed by a 6 minute walk, repeated 3 times. This week I switched to running for 2 minutes and walking for 5. I'll be honest the 1 minute run wasn't too hard but the thought of trying to make it to 2 minutes was a little daunting and on tuesday when I tried I could only go for about a minute and a half before I had to stop. Today I was able to do the full two minutes until my last round where I was about 20 seconds short. In my defense it was uphill and it was the end of my workout so I was tired. If anyone out there complains about being a slow runner and you can run faster that my 18 minute mile pace I kinda hate you a little. You are not slow, so stop saying you are. You're just making us truly slow runners feel worse about our snail pace. 

Friday: Nothin too exciting today. Did my workout and went to work. I ordered a book that I really want to read but I've got to go to bed in an hour and I know if I start it I'll want to read it till it's finished and that'll take a few hours. 5 am will look really horrible if I stay up reading all night. Granted if I stay up till 5 reading that's a different story. It most definitely would not be the first time. There was a time in my life where I watched a lot of sunrises but not because I got up to see it, I just hadn't gone to bed yet. 

On the topic of reading, it seems like a lot of running books have found their way into my library these past few weeks. I might be a little obsessed. If you're looking for a good running book I enjoyed 'The Incomplete Book of Running' by Peter Sagal. It's got a sense of humor to it that I found refreshing. There's also 'How to Lose a Marathon' by Joel A. Cohen. I could recommend a lot of different running books so I'll stop there. 

Saturday: It's come to my attention that maybe I should do one of those before and after photo things to show my progress. I'm not a fan of having my picture taken but I'll try. So here's my before photo. I'm only cringing a little (lot) as I post this. 

So now that I've done the cringey picture taking thing I can move on to the more exciting parts of the day. My run was pretty good. I still had a little trouble with that last run burst but again it was uphill. I have no idea if next week is going to work out because I've got to up my runs to 4 minutes with a 3 minute walk and repeat 4 times. I know I can push myself to do the 2 minute runs but 4 minutes just seems like too much of an increase too soon. I guess we'll see how it goes. The most exciting part of my day though was buying new jeans that were a couple sizes smaller than the ones I've been wearing. I've finally gotten to the point where I pull my pants up every five minutes so I broke down and bought new ones. I've never really liked shopping for jeans but it was nice to grab a size 16 and have it fit perfectly, not too tight not loose like the size 20 I was wearing before. It kinda made my day a little better. 

Week 3 of waking up early and week 2 of exercising has left me on a high note. I'm hoping next week I'll be able to still feel this good and this motivated. 

Small disclaimer: I started losing weight after the pandemic started because I stopped going out to eat multiple times a week with friends and had to start eating at home. That's why I was able to go down two pant sizes after only two weeks of working out. I was already in need of new pants and then the exercise made me drop a few more pounds and I got to the point where the baggy jeans just weren't cutting it anymore. I'm not trying to say I dropped two sizes after a few short workouts.