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Ultra Fail
On a chilly fall morning in north Texas, I was ready for what I thought would be a challenging day. Bags packed, knees weak, arms are heavy…oh wait. That is Eminem. The start line feeling isn’t much different. Heart pounding, butterflies in your stomach, anxiously waiting for the last “Aroo Aroo Aroo”…and then you’re off. My battle buddy and I did have our bucket packed and we thought we were ready for whatever awaited us. We had completed the Beast last year…and yes, one more loop would be hard but it is just one more loop, right? Wrong. Loop 1, the beginning Things started out like they normally do. My…
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Best. Race. Ever.
Usually…I’m the Debbie Downer of the group. Why am I here? What are we doing? SO MUCH NOPE. Not on this race day though! The skies were blue, the air was crisp and we were at the oldest ballpark in the nation on Veteran’s Day weekend. Terrible, horrible, 6,000 ramp (or so it seemed) weighted bear crawl? NO MATCH FOR MY POSITIVITY. Bruises on my hips from the metal stadium seats? WHO CARES. This race was WICKED PISSAH…and yes I just recently learned that phrase 🤣 thanks Boston! There will be more to come as I spend some more time “unpacking” the trip and some of the lessons I learned…
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You Say it’s Your Birthday
Another year around the sun. ☀️ Another year older, and another year fitter (ish?). A birthday is a lot like a new year, and luckily for me, mine is about halfway through the year so I can reassess where I am with regards to my goals. Everyone can do a mid-year check in regardless of when your birthday falls during the calendar year. So…here goes nothin’. Former Me Three years ago, I started on my fitness journey. I was at home, in my living room, hustling and sweating (because let’s face it, an outdoor workout after 6 am in July in Texas is less than appealing). Also I say “hustling”…
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Gratitude Challenge
One challenge I received recently is to start a gratitude journal. I have always wanted to start a gratitude journal, but I get stuck. I have the rote 4 or 5 things I’m grateful for, and my journal always said the same thing daily: Very generic! Very boring! Yes I’m grateful for all of these things but I can also recite them automatically and not actually think about why I’m grateful for these things. I received this challenge a week ago. I have not started this journal. (Much to the chagrin of my persistent friend, who asks me daily whether I’ve started…and only sent a few eyeroll 🙄 emojis when…
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Staying Sore to be Better
The other day I was complaining about how sore I felt, and loudly wondering if I would always feel this way. My friend quipped, “remind me the name of your blog again?” Touché my friend. Touché. The comment got me thinking about what the title of this website actually means to me. Does it truly mean that I am okay with feeling sore every single day? (Answer: abso-freaking-lutely not) Does it mean I expect others to push themselves to the point they are sore more often than not? (Also no) What it does mean, however, is that there are some days I’ll push myself past limits and feel the repercussions. It won’t be daily,…
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The Little Engine that Could Say Affirmations
Affirmations. According to Dictionary.com: The act of process of affirming something or being affirmed. In case you are wondering what exactly it means to “affirm” something (like…a friend of mine did 😉) it is to “state as a fact; assert strongly and publicly.” Just like the Little Engine that Could got up the hill because he repeated “I think I can” to himself over and over until he could say “I thought I could” in triumph at the top of the hill. (There you go–now you don’t really need to read this particular book if you haven’t yet.) I’m learning …the things we say to ourselves matter. I’m also learning…
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Hyrox Recap Ft. Worth 2023
Stay hopeful, stay humble, stay HY. These are the words repeated at the start line of every HYROX race. Honestly, everyone should run at least one Hyrox race just to experience the emotions at the starting line. The combination of butterflies and rocks in your stomach at the beginning — you know the torture you are about to commence, but you also know it isn’t anything you can’t do — is a crazy combination for sure. While in line to register, I overheard someone telling her friends that we get nervous before these races, because we care. If we didn’t care about the outcome, we wouldn’t be nervous. She was…
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Collect those raindrops
Life hits you at the strangest moments. As I was driving my daughter to school in the pouring rain, I looked up into a street light. The rain drops seemed to flow down to the earth in super slow-motion, and I could see individual drops, not merely sheets of a downpour. Seeing all of those individual droplets made me think about flooding…and I realized something. An individual droplet won’t cause a flood. It is an annoyance — but it doesn’t change its surroundings except to make them a little bit wet. Unless there are millions of droplets…the environment doesn’t change much. Millions of droplets, however, cause huge changes in their…
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If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it
We all have those days, weeks…months?…where we feel frustrated. Where we are making all the “right” moves toward our goals, but not exactly getting where we want to be. It’s complicated, and there is so much data to look at. How do you measure your progress? The Dreaded Scale Many people have a love/hate relationship with this device. It is the most common way to measure progress with health. The problem is, most people have a “weekly weigh-in” and don’t take into account the daily changes our body goes through. What you ate for dinner, how much water you are retaining, whether you have had a bowel movement…these all play…
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Keep it simple, even though it’s complicated
You know what to do. Honestly, we ALL know what to do. In an effort to keep it simple, here goes: eat right, exercise, sleep, keep stress to a minimum. It’s simple, really. Except then you start ruminating on all the different ways people determine the “right” way to eat. How often and what type of exercise? How much sleep? And what exactly is a minimum amount of stress? You get deeper into the world of fitness and you just end up with more questions than you started with. And strangely enough, the miracle cure for one person may not work for you. And what works for you may not…
