Accept what you can't change, change what you can't accept.

Everyone says the husband gains weight throughout his wife's pregnancy, sympathy weight they call it.  Well for me I did not even gain one single pound, yeay go me....until the baby was born.  Needless to say it has been a downward spiral of destruction since February 24th.  The overeating has gotten out of hand, eating out all time, ordering delivery simply due to convenience, neither of which are bad until you just order whatever it is you want all the time.  I am okay with treating myself occasionally but every single meal gets to be a bit out of hand.  Sometimes we gain weight and even though the scale says so you don't really feel it yet.  I can feel it now, I can feel it is my belly.  I am to that point where my pants are tighter, I feel it when I sit.  Time to get this in check, today.  As of this morning I have convinced myself to get back on the good food bandwagon.  It won't be easy, it never is, but once the decision has been made it's much harder to renege.  I don't want to fail, so putting a goal out there for all to see makes that decision to cheat or give up that much harder.  I am back on track with counting my food, if you bite it, write it, that is my motto starting today!  I easily lose weight when I follow Weight Watchers to the tee, the tricky part is actually following it.  I need to get back to going to meetings and not just occasionally showing up to weight in.  I can no longer accept this path of mediocrity, time for a change, time to shine.  See you on the other side.

Already need a few days rest.

I have been practically back pain free for almost two months...until yesterday.  It started in the morning and I didn't really think much of it, the doctor said it would happen so that's what I thought I was dealing with.  It progressively got worse throughout the day but I still felt like I could go to boot camp, especially after my recent motivational boost within.  So I get to class, start doing what we do and the pain is just too much.  I end up leaving class about 15 minutes early and while I am driving home I remember a recently forgotten memory from yesterday morning of me, while walking around the car parked in the street, completely biting it on the icy pavement.  I mean ass up, flat on my back fall on the ice.  I can't seem to figure out how I blocked this from my memory yesterday other than the fact that it did not hurt at the time, at all.  So now I give it a few days rest and see how I feel, then get right back to it.

You can actually see dudes face bounce of the ground.  Why is seeing people fall so funny?

If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.

The last ten days or so I have been in a funk.  Actually it is more than that, I have felt utterly unmotivated.  I was going to title this post "Unmotivated" but then I started thinking that is not a strong enough word.  The word I am looking for is "Uninspired".  I have not wanted to do anything other then be home with my family.  I have not worked out, not pushed myself at the office, not payed any attention to my food intake and frankly I have just been going through the motions.  The questions that have been running though my mind have been "why don't I want to workout" and "why don't I feel like working hard".  I don't know the answers to these questions but I have figured out that I cannot wait for inspiration to come to me, I need to go out and get it.

I think that I have actually made myself more lazy just by being lazy the last couple of weeks.  Granted I am still trying to figure out this whole fatherhood thing.  How I can do what I want while still being home for my son and my wife?  I work a long day, I am gone for over 10 hours before I workout.  It's hard to get home at 7 PM and only have two or three hours with my family before we have to start getting to bed so we can be up half the night taking care of a newborn.  I want to be home, I want to relieve my wife who has taken care of Eli all day.  Plus I want time with my son, just me and him.  The hours are limited and I am still working out that balance.  Balance is a great word for this because that is exactly what it is. Finding that balance between what I want personally and what I want for my family.  Laziness is not the answer, neither is waiting around to be inspired, because right now I feel like Beetlejuice when he is waiting for his 9,998,383,750,000 number to be called and they are now serving number 3.  It's time to make my own number 4.

Just sitting around waiting to feel good, or saying I will do that tomorrow does not push you any farther than the other side of the couch.  I am tired of feeling like crap and I have let this "funk" I have been in get the better of me.  It's time to stop feeling sorry for myself and get out there and make a difference.  Motivation and inspiration have escaped me as of late but I am on a quest to go and find them.  I am not sure where this journey will take me but I am finally prepared to start.

I run to add life to my days.

The majority of running I have done in my life has been by myself.  Not because I smell bad after a 5 miler or anything like that it's just that other than running with some peeps in class I don't really have anyone to run with.  My wife has ALWAYS been faster than me so when we run together I slow her down.  There is not much worse than running for an extended period of time at a pace slower than you are able, for really fast runners that slower pace is harder on them than their normal fast pace.  I slow my wife down and I want her to succeed and run as fast as she can all the time so we end up not running together that much.  Yesterday my friend Brent and I went out and ran Burke Lake.  We both run at similar paces and do not despise each others company.  The run was fantastic, it was cool, sprinkling a bit at the and and all around a damn good time.  As we finished the run I looked and Brent and said wow that went by crazy fast.  We ran 4.5 miles, talked just about the entire time, about work, about life, about whatever and literally the time just flew by.  Even today I look back at that run and know that it made my day a little bit better.  Having a partner in crime eliminated the monotony of running alone just listening to your own breathing.  We didn't have music playing, we just chatted it up like a couple of school girls and had a great time.  I think we are going to make this a weekly thing.  Hit boot camp as often as we can but run Burke Lake once a week.

You're only one workout away from a good mood.

It's amazing how much better I feel after just one day of getting back on track.  Yesterday, I ate within my points, I worked out and I feel fantastic.  Yesterday started as one of those "if I am pushed much farther I might go on psychotic murder spree of rage and destruction" days, but I worked though the anxiety and stress and kept telling myself that a good boot camp class was a few hours away would that alleviate all that added tension.  You know what, as much as I hated yesterday, once class ended I didn't even think about the hours earlier in the day, all of that worry literally vanished like a whisper in the wind.  Seeing my family helped with that as well but I contribute most of it to the fact the working out is a stress reliever, possibly the best one I have ever found.  No matter how hard my day is, how much I want it to be over, I am only one workout away from a good mood.  Whether it be a run, a bike ride, a boot camp class, it doesn't matter.  They all work.  Elevating the heart rate, breaking a sweat, those are the only things needed to elevate your mood and break yourself from the shitty day you were having.  We are all going to have bad days, some days are really bad.  Yesterday was a really bad day for me.  Even though I walked into the same issues this morning, I am having an easier time dealing with them because I have lowered my internal stress-o-meter.  Sometimes it bubbles over, and sometimes it fills so tight it explodes, a solid workout drains that stress away and allows me to start new.  I am not saying that it won't fill up again because it will, but at least now I know what to do next time it happens.

I will either find a way, or make one.

I feel confident is saying that the past two weeks have been rather busy.  Family has been in town staying with us, we have had a couple of photo shoots, a few sleepless nights, I have worked all week and what was the last thing...oh yeah we have a baby.  We are working on getting into some kind of rhythm here but we have not found it quite yet.  Luckily Eli sleeps for about 3-4 hours at a time with his most alert hours being from 2 to 4 AM.  So Hila gets up and feeds him, then I wake up and change him and rock him back to sleep so Hila can get back to bed.  The system seems to work and we both do our part.  Even though it is a rather rough hour of the morning, I enjoy this time with him.  It is my time to talk, sing and look at him.  Just me and him.  Man to man.  Father and son.

Remember all that talk about making time, and wasting time well now it's time to put my money where my mouth is and make some time in these crazy days ahead.  See the thing is I have not worked out at all, well I ran Burke Lake one day, but that is it.  Have not eaten well either.  I mean Ben and Jerry's just released new flavors, needless to say those flavors have gotten the better of my judgement as of late.  All of that is coming to a screeching halt after this weekend.  In the next week or so family will start to pack it up and head back to their respective establishments and a sense of normalcy will being to return.  I need to get back to bootcamp, I need to keep up with my fitness and healthy eating.  I am okay with putting something on the back burner for a week or two because of some extenuating circumstances but two weeks is my limit.  I have already had a rough start to the year with my back injury so my fitness level is continuously dropping.  I was considering running the Cherry Blossom 10 miler but with only 4 weeks left to train I am afraid I could not commit to a rigorous training schedule on top of everything else we have going on.  I have quite a bit on my plate right now and that might be too much, I also don't want to unnecessarily take away time from my family.  Bootcamp, running, writing class, work, fatherhood, husbandhood, that's a lot of hats to wear at one time.  Instead of juggling them all and dropping one every now and then I need to find a hat the fits for all scenario's.  I need to find a happy medium, it cannot be all or nothing.  This will take some time and some hard work to figure it all out but I will.  Either I will find a way or I will make one.  That's just how I do.