My Journey With Health And Fitness – A Good Training Week

Dry February finally came to an end yesterday, after 33 days I had a glass of wine. To be clear, it was only 1 glass. I have decided that since there were such positive effects from going without alcohol for a month that going forward I am going to limit my alcohol consumption to weekends (Saturday/Sunday) only. I admit this will be fairly easy because I don’t finish my final workout until 7:30pm during the week. I have also already decided that when I go to the trailer for Easter (a place where there is usually a fair amount of alcohol consumed) I’m going to take some of my favourite near beer with me to make it seem like I am camping but without the impacts.

This past week I trained hard. By hard I mean fully back to the level I used to train at when I got serious about losing weight. I put in at least 3 hours of workouts Mon-Sat (not including 5 days of strength training and doing my senior’s dog walking). I averaged 30k steps each day, more than met my zone target, far exceeded my km goal, and for once in a long time hit over 2500 calories burned each day. The result, I feel great. I’m back to being determined to keep going and my head is so much clearer. I still don’t get that exercise high that I keep hearing about but I do feel such an amazing sense of accomplishment.

But this week things really turned the corner for me. If you recall from my last blog I had done a 6km run for the first time in a long while. Well, this past week I did 4 6km runs (ok, yesterday’s was actually 7km as I miscalculated the distance). How did these feel, quite honestly it felt surprisingly good. Even after working out on the flat treadmill for all this time, tackling the minor hills around the city weren’t as challenging as I thought they would be. Rather, they just made me feel like I was working hard which is what I want. Next week I plan at the end of the week to do a ‘long run’, 8km. I’ll see how that feels and maybe give it a few tries before I do a 10km. Yes, I am getting close to being back to my fitness goal.

I was emailing with a client this week and when she was providing me with the meetings I need to be at next week I mentioned I was in training. She too is a runner so she asked me if I was training for another 1/2 marathon. I explained no, I am training to get rid of the laziness I have experienced over the last 6 months and it apparently it is working. I mentioned to my husband that I realized since I went back to being committed to serious training more than 6 weeks ago I have only missed 1 session (the day we had to frantically go fridge shopping). In actual fact I have added Sunday’s to the mix (though it is only 1 session of speed training) and I admitted I am pretty proud. In fact, I am smiling as I am typing this as I think, you’re back baby!