Archive for June, 2005
Focus
Wow, it is really easy to let your focus go. You can just relax, and see things unravel right before your eyes. Is it summer? Is it being so damned busy with work that you can’t think straight? I don’t know. But my focus is wavering.
I am working on my whole person solution. I’m reviewing my goals and trying to execute against them. But when it comes to allocating time in my day, I’m definitely not staying as religious to my fitness goals. It’s showing. I’m getting downright doughy in the middle. Shuuuugar.
Anyhow, I’m checking in, because I’m really wavering. And dammit since I switched this thing over, I can’t seem to get my blogrolling thing working, so I have to really manually work at reading your stuff. I think you’re all wonderful. I’ll get back there soon enough.
Don’t give up on me.
Check In On Goals
Happy Tuesday. I worked 3rd shift, so I’m groggy and out of sorts. I thought I’d check in on my goals.
Self
*Daily 5 minute reflection - Not so good. Spiritual stuff is not my forte. I’ll work harder.
*Daily 1 hour of mental puttering - Check.
*Daily 30 minutes *MINIMUM* fitness. - Check.
*Daily check-in on anything I eat.- Peanut butter is a problem. Still having monster issues.
*Daily 1on1 and face2face with my wife and daughter. - Check!
Work
*Too soon to call, but doing well-ish.
I’ve found that focusing on my list of actionable improvements is really useful, especially where they approach the whole body. I have also learned that I’m saying the following in my head VERY OFTEN:
*What’s important?
When I follow this q&a session, I seem to get through life better. It helps me not be nitpicky about the little things, in myself and others. It keeps my anxiety in check. I find it’s really helpful. What do you think? Would things change even a little bit in your life if you asked yourself often what was important in the heat of the moment?
Make and Keep Promises
The basic element of integrity is making and keeping a promise. Being trustworthy. It’s very important to start from within, with one’s self. If I can’t keep my own promises, how can I do this with others?
Integrity is also about keeping the same, consistent integrated view between all the aspects and elements of my life. Mind/body/heart/spirit, Self/Family/Work, Contributor/Leader. It’s about keeping all the arrows pointing in the same direction and adjusting course to maintain that integrated sense.
Writing something down is a powerful tool. It gives a lot more solidity and creedence to one’s plans when they are captured in physical form. To that end, here are the promises I’m writing down for myself for the next 4 weeks:
Overall/Self
*Daily 5 Minutes of Reflection (spirit)
*Daily 1 hour of mental puttering (mind)
*Daily 30 minutes *MINIMUM* of fitness activity (body)
*Daily check-in on anything I eat (body)
*Daily 1on1 and face2face with my wife and daughter (heart)
Work
*Weekly check-in on Goals and Pathfinding.
*Daily 20 minutes planning each morning.(Vision)
*Daily 20 minute blocks of focused work. (Discipline)
*Daily check-ins with team. (Passion).
*Daily reminder to team and self of importance of work. (Conscience).
Note that I tried to put something actionable to every one of the promises. If I keep them vague, like… “eat better”, that’s harder to act upon. If I say, “before I put anything in my mouth, I’ll ask if it’s the ‘right’ thing to eat,” then I can say whether I did it or not. Make sense?
I think those are enough promises for now. I’ll see how I do with those for 4 weeks. That’s my plan.
Still Here
So, I’ve been working a lot more on self-improvement than fitness specifically lately. As a result, I haven’t felt as much like posting. I tend to find that people read my blog for fitness information. That said, I’ve figured out everything I want to do for my “whole self” approach, and I’m going to use my journal as a method of accountability. I will also share what I learn through my efforts here, as always.
If you’ve been reading for a while, I’m still here. I’ll get back to the good stuff.
I’ve been very busy with work. It hasn’t let up. I won’t let you down.
Woo!
New personal record for squatting (free weights hack squats, meaning not all the way down to 90 degrees):
415 lbs
Oi. And no, I didn’t catapult the bar this time.
I biked 8.5 miles, too. Yum.
Food
So I read this great food preparation/planning core list thing provided to me by a wonderful person*, and I’ve come to this weird realization. I am not sure if this is related to my current lot in life, but here’s what I’m thinking with regards to food:
1.) I’m very lazy.
2.) I need to eat “easy” foods.
3.) I have little time to devote to food prep, but a little more time for planning.
To that end, I think I’ve moved away from a lot of the details of foods that are involved in preparation. In fact, I’ve been looking at food more like fuel over the last few months. I eat like this:
Morning: More carbs than protein.
Snack: I have been forgetting my morning snack, but nuts when I remember.
Lunch: salad with a can of drained tuna on top, balsamic vinegar, nuts.
Snack: a cookie or sweet something (fruit would be better)
Dinner: More protein than carbs. Energy bar or sandwich from Trader Joes.
Snack: pb&j without the bread (spoon!)
Kat told me her stomach is shrinking. She’s in her first trimester misery. She said it helped her understand hunger a lot better, though. Talking with her helped me remember a lot I’d read recently about stomachs. They’re about the size of a sandwich bag. (Not a quart). If you eat very slowly, they fill to the edges. If you eat quickly, they stretch beyond their normal size and permit more food. More food means more of it doesn’t process properly. What’s not processed properly becomes fat to hit the storage systems.
ERGO, if I ate meals that were sandwich-bag-sized, and ate them fairly slowly, I should notice a difference.
Another thing, and I read the actual study where the “soundbite” came from, is that consuming a really good dose of calcium a day REALLY works in cutting down belly fat, because there’s a different type of fat that burns away when there’s lots of calcium in one’s system. I’m going to adjust my eating accordingly.
What I’m not going to do anytime soon is follow a really specific diet. I tend to do the following:
*eat very little saturated fats.
*eat little/no white flour products.
*eat little white sugar products (cookie not withstanding).
*eat decent fiber/protein/vegetable content.
*drink 1 gallon of water daily (for weeks now).
I’m going to add some beans back into my diet because I just keep reading more and more about their benefits. Other than that, I’m not really going to focus so much on food. I’m finding that if I stay “relatively” decent on those items, then I can attack things through fitness.
What I *am* going to do differently is I’m going to resume a higher level of fitness efforts than I’ve done over the last little while. I think I’m resigned to the fact that work will be busy as hell forever. Instead, I’m going to accept this and find different times to get my fitness goals met.
Thanks to that special person for sharing the food information. I think it’s really useful and interesting. I actually stole a few things for future consideration.
Foundation
There’s something lovely about being able to do pushups again. For so long, my rotator cuff and deltoid area have been in pain (Remember my swell 150 pushups and however many chinups day?). But lately, I’m back in the saddle again.
Last night, I went oldschool. It was based on reading Stallone’s new book, SLY MOVES. May I digress a moment?
I recently rented and watched Rocky for the first time in a long time. I was struck by a lot of things. First, the movie was very low budget, and yet it won an academy award. Second, the story behind Rocky was that Stallone wrote the thing and wouldn’t sell the script unless he could be the star. He was SO POOR when he was trying to get this off the ground that he ate the most heinous foods when he could even afford those, and yet he gambled on his own hard work. I like how the art imitates life.
Sly Moves is an interesting blend of Stallone stories, his cheeky, self-effacing humor, and oh yeah, some Fitness. It’s fairly standard fare, insofar as the workout routines and the like go, and yet, it’s really well done. I liked the voice. And, it inspired me to go down and do some pushups and crunches and hard ab work last night, after I’d felt a bit alienated from my previous passion for oldschool calisthenics workouts. This put me back on that kick, at least a little.
Anyhow, when I look at my results to date this year, I’m not satisfied. I didn’t hit any of my goals with much success. However, I’m not particularly surprised, either. I made the goals without a lot of forethought. I made the goals without much buy-in from myself. I made the goals without much sense of their application to my daily life. Instead, I just set up a bunch of challenges to myself, and found that I could’ve cared less about the challenges, in and of themselves.
It’s a weird place. I’m maintaining my health, but I feel at the bottom of a new staircase. I thought I was at the pinnacle last year when I finished the marathon. Instead, I’m at this weird place where the new staircase involves a tighter integration.
Man, I sound freaky lately. Stop reading my blog. : |
Monday Morning Rework
I’m having a strange relationship with my fitness efforts. They’re a bit off base right now, but I think this is okay. I think it relates to my newly minted belief that I must have a more whole-person approach to what I’m doing and trying to accomplish. As always, I’m working on something, and I think it has some merit to spell it out here. This is more “theory related to fitness and life efforts” talk. Skip it if you want to hear about race results or fat free recipes.
Begin With the End in Mind
This should strike everyone as a no-brainer, but if one doesn’t determine what matters most to them, it makes the goals we set for ourselves fairly useless. To that end, I’m rethinking the guiding principles by which I wish to choose my goals. Again, I’m trying to integrate everything into an easy-to-follow view of the world. It helps to focus on what matters most to me.
Personal Health: This includes physical and mental health. I believe one must take care of one’s self FIRST before seeing to the needs of others. Having but one vessel to accomplish things outside of myself — my body — I must maintain a level of health to keep other promises in my life. Here’s where I throw my physical fitness goals, as well as mental and spiritual health goals. For the last one, I’m trying to do my own rendition of meditation. I’ll keep you posted.
Family First: My wife and child (+kid on the way) are my first priority, and then my extended family. It’s important that I always remember to integrate them into as much of my life as possible, while keeping a special space for myself for maintaining my individual identity. I use this principle to remind me that sometimes the here and now isn’t as important as the family-mindset big picture.
Learn/Teach: I believe this is probably my strongest personal vocation, and where the strength of my “voice” centers. To that end, I work towards this daily. I try to experience things, to capture them, to learn them, understand them, and then to model and teach them. Through this, I try to bring understanding to others, because I feel that people like to feel educated about things that matter to their daily existence.
Create: It’s important to create new things, to be excited about projects that use other parts of my brain. I’ve neglected this a lot lately, or rather, I’ve channeled my talents into other avenues. I’m going to rebuild some of this within myself.
Laugh My Ass Off: It’s pretty important to keep humor in my life. I use this principle to include everything about life that’s fun and funny. This matters a lot, too.
Anyhow, I’m still going to write about self improvement and fitness and nutrition and the like. This is just something that’s swirling around me at the same time.
Thoughts?
Corporate Challenge
I ran the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge in Boston this year. I beat last year’s time by 4 minutes. My 3.5 mile race took 34:50, which sounds a little slow, but you’ve gotta include all the walkers one must dodge, and understand that this 3.5 miles is crowded with over 12,000 people. I was well within the times of my colleagues and that was nice, too.
Better than all this, my dad did the same event. He ran/walked with his team, and I did it with my gang. But I saw him afterwards. Talk about proud. My dad, who is in his 50’s, has lost 65 or now almost 70 pounds. He walked and ran in his first ever event, and he has turned his own health around immensely.
Oh, and by the way, my Mom’s not doing too shabby in those regards either.
My Daughter turns 3 today. I wrote her a two page letter last night when I got home from the event, with the hope that I’ll do this every year and then give her the whole kaboodle at some point when she’s old enough to care. We’re celebrating this weekened with this amazing event that my wife put on, invlolving our little local theater and food and the Heffalump movie, etc. It’ll be nice. My wife is amazing with all the small touches she puts on things.
I’m 80% through Covey’s 8th habit book. I really recommend it to anyone who really wants to make significant and lasting improvements in their life. This book attacks things from the point of view of a whole person, and for once in my life, I’m really responding to it. I’m finding some sense of how I can apply all this to my life, and it’s really making a world of difference in my efforts in ALL aspects of my life.
I hope you’re well.
Wowee!
What a bikey weekend. I did 10 miles bicycling on Saturday and then 35 miles on Sunday. Not 35 in a row, exactly, as I would bike somewhere, do things, and then bike somewhere else. The biggest stretch in a row was like 12 or 14.
Add to that some barefoot running on the beach (mostly chasing my really fast nearly-3-year-old daughter) and I got LOTS of good fitness effort out of this weekend.
Tomorrow’s a 3.5 mile Boston Corporate Challenge run. Besides the fact it’ll be nearly 90 degrees and stifling humidity, I think it might be fun. : /
Mentally/Spiritually, I started working on a “centering” methodology, where I do some visualization and some focusing and some breathing to try and give myself a starting point, “my house” from where I can approach various challenges. I tried it against some low-level challenges and found it worked well. Basically, I used a visualization of myself sitting cross-legged on a polished hardwood floor looking out an open wall from a very small room with a roof (basically a small “house” with an entire wall cut out for visualizing what’s outside). From there, I’d use the visualization to center myself when a challenging event happened. Let me make one up.
Event: My daughter throws a fit and flattens herself onto the concrete.
Typical reaction: get cranky and force her to do what I want her to do anyway.
New method: center, flash the words/image in my head “my house,” and that reminds me to consider what I want the outcome of this interaction to be. Then, make a better response, such as saying, “You’re really frustrated. I know. I’m sorry you’re frustrated. Come up up and let’s figure this out.”
It’s applicable to anything. If you’re running and want to quit, center around your visualization, and then ask yourself what you want the outcome of the challenge to be. If you’re about to eat something you might not want to eat, same deal. How about at work? Someone really bug you and set you off all the time? Try this.
The goal is to stretch the perceived alotted time between stimulus and response, thus giving one’s self a better chance to choose one’s own response to the stimulus.
I’m trying really hard to learn this “whole person” paradigm and apply it in as many ways possible to all areas of my life. It certainly helped me ride all those miles yesterday, and it’ll help me get ready the larger events I have planned for the fall. What do you think about when you read this type of stuff?
