Goal Setting

If you participate in any form of social media, you know you're friends tend to fall into groups. If you're in your early to mid thirties like most of my friend group you have a little from the following:

The Mommies
The Nerds
The Harry Potter Fans (insert other fans here too)
The Crafters
The "Always at the Gym"

So when one of my dearest friends put up she was interested in doing a half marathon, I thought "Well this is unexpected". So I commented something along the lines of "Really?"

Then the text conversation started.

A few minutes later, both of us were signed up for our first half marathon. I wish there were more to it but it was really as simple as that.

This happened on Saturday night, but Sunday morning she was putting me to shame by already going for a run and telling me that she was going to do the leg workout I did on Saturday on Monday morning. But she didn't have a lot of guidance.

At this point, most half marathon plans I've found run for 12-13 weeks, which gives us two months to get to that point.

Until then, I made a plan for us to increase time by 10% every week to two weeks and get three runs in at first, then move to four. I will be sharing this math on my Instagram (@jackienelli) seen in the upper right corner of my page.

I've run since essentially my peak weight, so running is nothing new to me. However, since I started running post-op I've noticed an adjustment was needed for nutrition. No longer can I have a carb filled dinner the night before.

I ran the 10K Across the Bay a few weeks ago and finally got a 10K PR for myself. I attribute part of my success to taking Gu Packs every 40 minutes or so. This will likely be continued in a blog post as training continues.

Anyway, we're both very excited for this run. I'll be posting many of my workouts to Instagram and I'll put some summaries on here from time to time.

Favorite Motto

If you've been reading a lot of my posts, you have probably identified a common theme or mantra that I live by:

If you've failed to plan, you've planned to fail.

I wanted to put down a few things that I do to plan and make life more manageable.

Vitamins: Every Thursday night is Vitamin night. I take about 10-15 minutes to organize my vitamins into an organizer. This 10-15 minutes means every morning, I just grab my container for the day and I'm good. Part of why this works for me is because I use Celebrate vitamins specifically formulated for bariatric patients. If I had more individual supplements, the 10-15 minutes that it took would be extended but still, it would make the rest of the week easier.

Meal Planning: A few days before I go shopping, I write out a little quick agenda of the week's events. I indicate if we have plans, and how those plans affect our eating habits. Sometimes, it might be being out all day so we're going to eat out, or we might have a potluck event that we need to plan for. I organize what we might want to eat on given days (20 minutes if you add in looking for recipes that I've already found) then I...

Write a food list: I take this writing out a food list a step further. I write down all of the ingredients we need and I indicate what recipe it will be used for. I learned this when I went to make a Broccoli Slaw for a party and Broccoli was just stupid expensive at the store so I decided to make something different, but I didn't know what other items were for the recipe, so I bought everything except broccoli.

Organizing Time: Google Calendar has been a lifesaver. But I take it a step further. I put in the times for working out just as I would a doctors appointment. This serves two purposes. I see that it's there and if I'm trying to make plans I know I need to reschedule, and also it makes working out less of a "if it's convenient" thing and more of a "this is a thing I need to do".

By doing all of these things (and more I'm sure I'll think of later) I organize my time and plan my hours properly.