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Monday, September 16, 2013

Committed to Fitness

I'm making a new commitment to fitness! I want to exercise for an entire year on a weekly basis.

I've been good at sticking to a rock solid routine for 1, 2 or even 3 months. 3 months was the longest when I did the full P90X routine. It always ends the same. I take a week or two break, or something comes up and I miss a few workouts. That week or two, or couple workouts turns into months with little to no exercise. That absolutely WILL NOT do!

I've been through this many times before and motivated myself to start working out and have stuck to it for awhile, but ultimately fizzle out and quit again. This time I want it to be different. This time instead of trying to kill it for 2-3 months, I want to set a realistic goal and stick to it for a year. I figure if I can set a goal of a year and actually meet that goal, working out should have long become a habit by the time a year rolls around.

You may be wondering how this all came about. Well, it's been brewing for awhile. I saw some pictures of myself not too long ago of when our boys were born and it actually disgusted me. I thought, "Do I really look that scrawny and weak?" I guess my mental image of myself was better than what the reality was. Good for self esteem I guess, but seeing the reality of how scrawny I look in pictures brought that way down! This past weekend, two things really brought all this to the forefront.

We had our annual work picnic on Saturday. It was a lot of fun! Monica was working so I solo parented the trip with the boys. Everybody loved them! They were so good and smiled at everyone! They got passed around the entire time I was there. I held Jace for a little while, but most of the time I only took them out of their car seats and put them back in a few hours later to leave, lol. We played volleyball, threw a Frisbee around, ate hot dogs and burgers. It was a blast! While me and a buddy were throwing the Frisbee around, I realized just how out of shape I am. The small amount of running I did had me breathing heavy and gassed. I actually had to quit because I was breathing heavy and ran out of steam. This never happens to me! I'll get worn out and breath heavy sure, but never do I have to quit playing around because of it. No bueno! That was number one.

Number two happened Sunday. The release of the long anticipated Living Extreme: Beyond Cystic Fibrosis documentary! It's an awesome video!! I strongly encourage everyone to follow the link and watch it, especially if you are a fellow CFer! When I first heard of the video I honestly thought "Oh I should submit myself and see if I could be on it. I'd probably make the cut." After watching the trailer I knew right away.... I'm lame. Haha!! I'm not extreme! The folks in the video (in my opinion) are the epitome of extreme! There's a brother/sister duo that are crazy good snowboarders. I'm talking travel the world competing snowboarders! A doctor in her 50's who works out like crazy, and a lady who golfs 18 holes on a regular basis, carrying her clubs and walking the coarse, as well as swimming laps several times a week! These folks are extreme!!! The most extreme of all was a guy named Brooks. His PFT's got down in the 40's. He started running and now runs ultra-marathons. That's 100 miles!!! I have yet to do more than a 5K and he's running 100 miles. This was number two.

So what's my goal??? Here it is...

To run 2 days a week and lift 2 days a week.

If I do more, I do more. I wanted to make it 5 days a week. Thought about 3 days a week. Maybe 4 is a little ambitious, but it shouldn't be. Wednesdays are tough for us. Sundays are tough. My schedule on Wednesdays goes as such, leaving me with literally one hour or less of down time.

5:00am - wake up, get dressed, grab meds out of fridge
5:05am - start treatments
5:40am - end treatments, grab bite to eat to go
5:45am - leave for work
work 8 hours
4:00pm - get home from work, play with boys, spend time with wife
4:15pm - start treatments
5:15pm - end treatments, maybe eat dinner
6:00pm - leave for church (I teach youth on Wednesday nights at our church)
9:00pm - arrive home, start putting boys to sleep
9:45pm - usually by now boys are both down for the night, grab a snack, shower, get ready for bed
10:30pm - hopefully I am snoozing by now so I can get 6.5 hours of sleep before getting back up at 5am again.

This leaves me with Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday to workout.

I figured 4 days should be good to start because something will always come up. A birthday party for one of the families, a church outing, something will inevitably eat up an entire evening on one of the weeknights I'm supposed to workout. So with leaving 1 of the 5 days I have available open, I should be able to compensate for such events.

Ideally I want to run a third time. For right now I'll stick to two.

I thought about holding off on posting this until I got closer and had more time to think about this. A post I read by a fellow cyster (female CFer) encouraged me to do it now! Here's her post, click here. I need to be held accountable and now I will be :)

I have to make exercise a priority and get into a routine. It has to become a normal part of life. After all, my life depends on it. The stories of those in the video are living proof that exercise is key to survival with CF.

My start date is October 1st.

I hope to look back on this post on October 1st, 2014 with an overwhelming feeling of accomplishment and not be overwhelmed with shame.

As one of my favorite reality TV stars Christopher "Big Black" Boykins would say "DO WORK!"

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