My Journey With Health And Fitness – Time To Challenge Myself

In my last post I noted that I intended to run at least 5 days a week regardless of the weather. Well yesterday when I went to do my run it was raining and quite frankly Wednesday is when I get together with my coffee group and I didn’t want to show up soaked. I opted to run on the hated treadmill and actually used it as an opportunity to push myself a bit. Today I checked the weather app and it said it would remain cloudy for the rest of the day, it lied. I was about 40 minutes into my run when it started to rain. I finished the run and started my 5km walk despite the fact I was already getting cold and I was wet. I could have called home for someone to rescue me but I decided I need to do this so for a total of 1 hour and 50 minutes my workouts were in the rain. Gotta admit felt pretty proud of myself when I was done (though I also felt pretty cold).

I have been thinking lately that it is time to challenge myself and to stop being convinced that I am going to fail. To be honest I think my only failure will be if I don’t try. So where is this coming from? Well, I started thinking about what I have accomplished. Let’s leave aside the fact that at 56 years old I ran my first (and probably last) 1/2 marathon. I lost so much weight and kept most of it off that I no longer take any medications and my diabetes is in remission. This week alone I have done 3 6km runs and walked up Oxford Hill 3 times with the goal of doing each at least 5 times per week. Yesterday I deadlifted 72lbs which is more than 1/2 my body weight. Yes, these may all be considered challenging myself but I feel I am holding back.

As I have mentioned, when I was in Mexico I did online workouts with my fitness centre. Doing those meant no one could really see me. To me that meant I could try to improve on some things and if I wasn’t successful no one would ever know but me. So I worked on a couple things. Firstly I focused on taking my lunges to a much lower level. I was always nervous about this in class because I sometimes lose my balance on my bad leg. But you know what, I found that I can absolutely lunge much deeper than I had been doing. Secondly is I realized that my core has gotten so strong that I should be able to do full sit ups something that even in high school was a struggle for me. Well guess what, I am now doing those as well.

And so I started thinking, it is time to challenge myself every time I am at the fitness centre doing a class. No more using the weights that I know I can do but bumping them up another notch each and every time. I know there may be times when I have to back down a bit but that is ok. I proved it to myself yesterday doing those deadlifts in which we were doing 3 sets of 6-8 reps. I sucked it up and did 8 reps for the first 2 sets and when I got to rep 6 on the last set I thought about stopping but nope, I did 8 reps that round as well.

From now on I am going to ask my trainers to push me and not let those afraid voices in my head stop me from challenging myself. I’ve come this far but I know this journey is going to take me even further.