Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Chilly January

Cold, cold, cold! It's been cold the past couple of days. When it gets like this, we burrow into the finished side of our basement to watch movies as a family, and spend quality time. That's been really nice and as a bonus, we're getting lots of laundry done.

January has been eventful so far, with lots of work to keep us busy, and the toddler is really quite a handful these days. We have fun playing, and I try to keep her involved in things -- like cooking, setting the table, cleaning up here and there. She's good at all of this stuff, but it's a double edged sword because sometimes you just want to cook the thing and be done with it. It is a chance to take a deep breath and find a new level of patience.

Running wise I've been going very strong with just over 100 miles so far in January. I've been stretching more, too, and I'm feeling the benefit of that in my piriformis, which had been experiencing some sciatica like pain since about September. It's much better to not be in pain. Even though I've been skeptical about stretching in the past, I think having built it into my routine in a really big way has helped, so I'm planning to keep that up.

Food-wise things are going well, with a couple of cheat days here and there. I'd like to lose more weight, so I'm trying to be really good about what I eat during the week. This week we failed at going grocery shopping, so I'll have to make due with what's in the house for today.

I'm thinking a lot about getting a cheap exercise bike and starting to grind out some time in my z1 for aerobic training. The cross training would help a lot, I'd get some extra calories in, but I'm hoping it would also give me a better base once the weather gets better and I'm out on the road more. Maybe even make it more comfortable. I'm going to need to do something like that because February is always a tough month running wise, and yesterday was already a -18 day where my eyes nearly froze shut.

My maternal grandfather passed away a few days ago. I've been estranged from that side of my family for nearly a decade now, so it's conflicting. I have a handful of good memories, but largely my memories  of that entire family are very tinted by my experience with my mother. Suffice to say, he was a product of his generation, race, and class. For good or for ill, that's a thing I can say.

It feels wrong to not mark it in some way, but being estranged it isn't like I was invited to the funeral. This is how I learn things about that side of my family now -- I tend to find out who has passed away by googling them, or on my genealogy websites. It is tough for me because I do not want to have this same type of fractured relationship with my own kids. They will be better off by not being exposed to toxic influences, but I hope that they don't ever view our relationship in that way. I do think, even with my own parents, that they did their best. That just can't always make up for what we go through in life...

Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Resolutions (part 2) 2019 Goals

Here are the goals I'm looking to set for 2019. Each year I try to pick 10 things to focus on, with five of them being parenting goals, and five of them being goals for endurance sport. This year I'm going to try something different -- three goals for my parenting life, my professional life, and my life in endurance sport.

First, my parenting goals:
  1. Spend at least two hours a day playing, reading, singing with my kids.
  2. Prioritize time alone with each of the children.
  3. Get the kids outside more, on trails, in the woods.
Secondly, the professional goals:
  1. Pursue additional certification with regards to tech implementation
  2. Begin to seriously put some practice time in on my instrument
  3. Practice random kindness in the workplace
Third, my endurance goals:
  1. Run a 50km trail race
  2. Cross train more (bike, strength)
  3. Run more trails (in training)
Lastly, an overall goal of mine is to de-emphasize materialism in the upcoming year, and to focus on experiences and quality time.

*****

I know that hour/day goals become difficult to measure for me, because I'm often being pulled in so many directions that it is difficult to quantify time. I figure right now I probably spend two or three hours with my toddler a day playing and reading, etc. In the next year I want to start to quantify it, only to have an idea of what we're doing. I may blog some of that stuff here, but I'm also going to just jot things down as we do them.

Health-wise I tracked my weight almost every day last year. The goal of that was two-fold: I wanted to see the trend, but I also wanted to train myself to take the number on the scale less seriously. When it is just one thing you do in a day, it's a lot easier to lessen the build up on "weigh-in" days. That worked pretty well, a side effect being that I never lost as much weight as I intended. Although, I did manage a pretty respectable marathon time in spite of that extra weight. So that's fun, but we'll see what I can do about any of it in 2019.

I've signed up for a "Run the Year" challenge. 2019 miles means a little over five and a half miles every day. I'm not planning to run it like that, but I am thinking about using the log software run the year uses to keep my streak going. And it syncs activities from Strava, so not a lot of extra work on my part there. Hopefully with a marathon training plan, and then a 50km plan, I'll be able to pull of the mileage.