My Journey With Health And Fitness – Stopping The Guilt

I can feel spring coming! Today we headed up to our trailer to start getting it open for the season. It always starts with Easter Weekend which is traditionally a girls’ weekend (it started nearly 2 decades ago with Mom and my sister and I have kept the tradition going). Most of the big stuff is done including a good cleaning of the inside of the trailer and necessities such as propane have been purchased. My husband and I will head back for an overnighter next Saturday to try and get the tv/satellite working as well as the hot water heater. Then everything will be ready.

Leading up to today I was getting a little stressed. It has been a busy week which included a lot of volunteering, meetings with clients, doing taxes and trying to get year end finished for one of my clients. There has not been a lot of time for much else but I still managed to get 300+ zone minutes in each day Mon-Fri. Of course there was also going out to celebrate St Patrick’s Day (also the day we toast the loss of my father in law who passed away on March 17th 11 years ago) and I was feeling the pressure. As we wanted to head to the trailer as early as possible today I opted to get up at 3:45am to get a good workout in. However, before heading out with the family yesterday I realized this was just not going to happen. After 7 weeks of not missing working out at least 6 days a week (and several where I did 7 days) I was going to have to be realistic and skip a day.

When I told my family this they all agreed it was the best idea. Oh but then the guilt happened. What if I take a day off and I lose my momentum? What if I don’t make my calorie goal for the week? Oh God, maybe I’ll go back to being lazy. What if I’m not able to run 8k again on Tuesday? Ok, time for a deep breath. I know what an expert I can be at piling the guilt on to myself which makes me feel miserable so after a bunch of beating myself up I decided time to look at what I have accomplished.

In 7 weeks I have done the following, of the 49 days I have done some form of workout 47 of them. I have walked/run a total of 723 km which works out to an average of 103 km per week. I have put in 11,536 zone minutes or an average of 1,648 where the recommended minimum is 150 minutes. And finally, I have walked over 1 million steps in the last 49 days which works out to an average of 22,000 steps a day. Yes, I have met or exceeded my goals every week, now that is an accomplishment.

So, no guilt for taking a day off, instead I am calling it my full recovery day and relishing in what I have done in the last 2 months. Tomorrow will be my normal Sunday lesser walk then I am back at it hard as ever on Monday.