It's Been a While....

...but everybody's got to start somewhere, right? And I'm starting over. Yes, again. But that's ok, because I know I've got it in me.

Funny how your outlook can shape your life. I know I've talked about that in previous posts, but no matter where we are on our journey, there's always something to be learned. I could not have foreseen it going into 2016, but last year turned out to be one of the hardest years of my life, second only to the year my late husband, Bill passed away.

 Last winter was brutal. So brutal, in fact, that we were literally housebound for three weeks. I couldn't even step outside the door without sliding down the mountain, and there were a lot of other days scattered throughout the season as well where outside workouts and/or traveling to a workout place (gym, track, trail) were just not possible.

 Still, I did my best to hang on, and although I gained back about 20 pounds, I still felt positive about getting back on track with spring just around the corner. I battled a grueling speed-training session to meet my 10k goal in March, a bum knee, and the absolutely unexpected announcement that although we were already incredibly short-handed at work, my department lead threw in the towel and retired. I was left holding the bag with two just-hired trainees who had no clearance access to the system (and didn't know anything at all, even if they HAD)....so not only did I have to do ALL the things (bi-weekly payroll for 2500+ government employees), I had to train the newbies at the same time.

I won't bore you with the details, but all the extra time it took and the pressure I was under caused my stress level to shoot past the moon, and my health suffered tremendously because of it. All my wonderfully cathartic, afternoon process-the-day runs were a thing of the past. All my carefully prepared meals and intake monitoring gave way to full-blown survival mode as I did whatever it took to get through the day.

For food, I either shoveled what was easy or in front of me, or ignored it completely, never leaving my desk through the week, working crazy hours long into the night to keep pace, trying desperately to catch up with home life on the weekends I wasn't working. For exercise, I stressed. I let go of every single thing in my life that wasn't critical. And I lost every shred of my personal life in the process. I can say this now, one year removed from the turmoil...that it is amazing that I survived. But I did survive.

These days, my life has finally leveled off. I am now the head of my department with a staff of four doing the job I did alone for the majority of the year. The training is not over, and probably won't be for some time...but they are all self-sufficient. And I can now go home at the end of my shift, secure in the knowledge that the building will still be standing the next day when I come back. No more overtime for me (unless there is an emergency, which may be once or twice a year), and there is now time to breathe, to focus on my health, and to bring my life back into alignment.

The balance that I had finally found was utterly lost last year, but it's time to reclaim that. I know I can do it. I've done it before, and I have the knowledge and the tools I need already in place. For Christmas, I made sure Santa brought me a new treadmill, so that I will never again be caught in the winter with no way to get a workout in. I went to the store and stocked up on new Tupperware containers and the foods I would need to get back in the swing of my everyday, pre-disaster life. I updated the My Fitness Pal, Runkeeper, and Rock My Run apps on my phone, and I finally stepped back on the scale to face the ungodly gain that was the result of months of bad eating, stress and inactivity expecting to have surpassed my highest weight, and pleasantly surprised to find that despite everything, I hadn't quite gotten there, after all.

One week ago...I began again to put it all into place, to rebuild once again the life I had worked so hard to attain. I know I can do it, I know because I've been there. I know because I want that life back so bad, I can taste the sweetness of it from here. This morning, I stepped back on the scale for my first weigh-in of the new age. And I had lost 4.6 pounds.  

Confucius was a wise, wise man. That single first step is everything.