I'm Grateful... I Think

I am grateful, really, I am. But this fitness thing really takes up a lot of my precious time.

My company does a great job of providing incentives to be healthy. They have their own reasons for keeping us healthy (so we keep coming to work instead of calling in and running up bills for our chronic diseases) but there's no doubt that they are giving us a gift. They have hooked us up with WebMD for purposes of record keeping and learning about healthy lifestyle choices, and they have given us a set of criteria to meet and for which we earn points that go towards lowering our insurance premiums. Short of packing our sports bags and chauffering us to our work outs they've done all they could towards making this happen.

The current "1st Quarter Challenge" is to log our steps (goal is > 10,000 steps per day using a pedometer) and at least 150 minutes of heart-raising exercise per week. It's actually pretty easy to get 150 minutes -- that's 30 minutes 5 days per week. What's hard for me is not putting it off to another day! So I make myself exercise daily in the hope that if I don't do it, I won't feel good. HA! I would feel like a million bucks if I could just sit on my couch drinking diet Coke and nibbling on snacks while I read or watch a movie. No such luck.

So that's why my blog entries have slowed down. I'm now running around in the neighborhood trying not to get bitten by the local canine riff-raff, and unless you want to know how many steps I did today I have less to blog about because I'm not doing anything but stepping and counting.

But you know what? I'm starting to feel pretty good. I'm sore every day, but I think my body is starting to get used to the pounding and getting stronger. What happens when the 1st Quarter Challenge is over? I'll surely sign up for whatever the next one is, but I'd better pretend this one's ongoing because in reality, it is. This needs to be a way of life, the way it was for my Dad. Sometimes I talk to him while I'm exercising. I say, "See Dad? I'm exercising." It's a pain in the ass so he better be happy about it.