My Journey With Health And Fitness – Taking A Mental Health Day

It was a brutal fitness class this morning but in a good way. We did about 26 different exercises doing 60 seconds on then 20 seconds rest. I realized as we were getting to the end that we had way too much time available so we were about to be tortured. Yep, that is exactly what happened. There was Tubthumping, Sally Get Ups and Thunderstruck some of them done more than once. The thing I realized is I can keep up with those in the class that are are 20-25 years younger than me. In some cases I can even out do them. So yes it was tough but at the end I was pretty proud of myself at the work I had put in.

I mentioned on my last post my goal is 20 km 6 days this week. I’m rethinking that slightly and considering changing it to an average of 20 km. You see, today was family fun day also known to me as a mental health day. As you are aware things in my life have been pretty stressful lately and I sometimes find every time I accomplish something I find another roadblock has been erected. Yesterday I thought I could see the light at the end of the tunnel only to find something new (and in my opinion quite ridiculous for the amount of work based on a very small amount of money). Trust me I laid awake most of the night trying to figure out what I can do about this.

But we decided this summer we were more than ever determined to do a family fun day each week. We have a list that we made last year of places we wanted to go but never got around to doing many of them. And so today we went to Fort Langley and started with the Canadian Historic Site. For those of you not from this area this Fort was built by the Hudson Bay Company back in the early 1800’s and was originally a fur trading post. It was made a historic site more than a century ago and while I had been there a couple times in the past but not for close to 4 decades.

After our fascinating tour we decided to go for lunch at a fabulous 50’s diner. Trust me I had the largest egg salad sandwich that I had ever seen. And it was good, really good. We then went to some of their novelty stores and purchased a few items. Just touring around downtown was so much fun and helped me forget all the hard stuff going on in my life right now.

I am going to keep giving myself these mental health days each week. Just those few hours of doing something fun and interesting really made a difference in how I feel. And ok, I’ll likely go out for another bit of a walk and get myself up to the 20 km. That way I won’t deride myself all night about how I didn’t meet my goal.