Start strong... stay strong

Not picture: Searing pain

I guess the hardest and best thing to do when you change your behaviour is to just stick with it. It's all vegetables, meat, gym and getting stuff done these days. Monday at the gym was great, my squat form has improved out of sight (amazing what a good trainer will do) and since then I've been hobbling around because I am bad with progression management and I may have said, "I feel great! Who needs to warm down?"

Bullseye!

 We had our first (and last) beginner archery class on Tuesday night. I say last because now we can shoot and do all the archery things, don't need no more beginner classes! We were there for two hours, just over an hour actually shooting and it makes me want to cry tears of boredom wondering how an introductory course at other establishments can take 6 - 8 weeks. By the end of the night I could strike the bullseye and my grouping was fairly consistent. Unless those other beginner courses are preparing you for the Olympics, I don't know what on earth they teach to fill the extra hours.

Just keep eating, just keep eating...

My body is having a strange time adjusting to the new diet. I think it has a lot of positives, but sometimes I am ravenous and other times when I have proteins to eat I just don't feel any hunger. At those points I start out slow by eating all the greens and tentatively building myself up to eat a portion of meat. I am well motivated though, I want to put on about 8kg of muscle but I need to support that with intaking the parts to build it up.




Honestly - I used to think diet was a distant second to exercise in the scheme of fitness and well being (unless you were a competitive sculptor, builder, lifter etc) - partially because I don't care about food and have never been heavy, and have previously managed some muscle definition without being too careful about my consumption.



But I kind of feel like now is the time. If I'm honest, every moment is 'the time', but hesitating takes away from the finite time that we do have. So... yes. I'm going to eat my chicken now.

nom nom nom

And we're back!

Wow, it's been a while aye?

Anyway. Where did we leave off? Geez, a lot happened in two years.

This happened to my league

Unfortunately my team captain and co-captain threw all their toys out of the cot after a steller 2012 season. By that I mean they drove half the team away with their hateful attitudes and basically imploded the league which still manages to limp along. Sadly NZ derby is like any organisation run by volunteers - there is a lot of enthusiasm and but not a lot of competency. 

Still a winner!

But I still loved skating! We went to the parks and the roller discos, but it felt directionless. So we signed up for "Learn to Skate" with an artistic club. Once we were there we were snaffled up by the Masters before we had even made it through all the ranks. We won a gold medal in a sport internationally recognised by governing bodies. Plus, errmerrgerhd artistic leotards are just like ice skating ones, amazing! 

Backing up for a minute, after I walked away from derby due to political differences with an executive board that can't follow any of their own rules, I basically slid to a stop. I was in a new relationship after a couple of years being single and we focused on keeping each other entertained. I discovered I still had a job and threw myself back into that, snaffling a promotion within a month or two. Then it was all work, movies, phone games and generic family activities - everything was good, but I found myself sinking into 'the comfort zone' again... work, come home, shower, snacks, play with the birds (oh yes, we got cockatiels), TV, lazing around, dinner, bed, repeat. Too many weekends where we left the house to get groceries and not much else. 

Last time this happened I put up with it for three years before I snapped. The only good thing about snapping is that I rebel by grabbing all the opportunities and picking up all the activities at once. It had been eighteen months of sitting around achieving not much else than that shiny gold medal, but it wasn't enough and I snapped. That was the other week. 

Click!

Roll forward a couple of weeks and I've joined the gym properly - no more six week trials I don't follow through with - updated the diet (apparently necessary to build all the lean mass I want), booked guitar lessons and taking up archery (to enter the Masters Games in 2017). I've hashed out a weekly schedule that looks good and we'll see if I need to add anything else to fill up my time to get me out of bed and stop playing games on my phone when I could be doing something better. 

Until then ...

wow I was going to post a Buzz Light Year image with "To infinity and beyond!" but instead I discovered that it is some sort of bizarre trend that a pair of women get half each of this tattoo on each other and it seems really weak and uninspired now. I have to go shake off these hibbly-jibblies.