hell yes, I finished a half marathon!

I'm still riding the high of completeing something I never thought I would or could do: a half marathon! Thanks for pushing me to do it, and for training with me, mom.

I didn't think it was that big of a deal until I did it, and shed a few tears upon the completion of this task. I don't know what it was -- the release of emotion after pushing my body and mind further than I thought I could, or the fact that at my previous law firm job I never would have had the time or energy to train for the run -- but it was awesome.

In keeping with this "look what my body can do!" theme, I have to share this awesome article my bff sent me today: http://jezebel.com/5689226/a-call-to-arms-and-abs-quads-calves-and-shoulders?skyline=true&s=i (sorry, this blog never wants to turn my links into active links!) Rock on, sista. This endeavor has me inspired to try some new things soon . . . maybe rock climbing, finally?

time flies when you're doing long runs and boot camp

The current phase of my fitness journey has been in progress for 5.5 weeks now. The once dreaded half-marathon is THIS SUNDAY! (and I'm running in my sweet new purple shoes, above) Instead of wanting to sleep in and skip it, I am actually excited for it. You read that correctly: I am excited to run a half marathon. The past five weeks have been very challenging. Getting up at 5:30 every day to workout in the cold (and dropping) temperatures with the moon and stars still out is a powerful thing. It really makes you feel like you're sacrificing comfort of a warm bed and laying around for something good for you, which is pretty empowering. Running 10 miles at 6am so you can still get to work on time is something I never thought I'd do. Yet . . . here I am. And now I want to see all of this hard work pay off by running the half this weekend.

I was very encouraged when we did our fitness testing in boot camp and I improved my time by more than three minutes. That was HUGE for me. Amazing what a little change and challenge can do! Similarly, when I first was running, I was at a 14.5 minute mile and was dead after two or three miles. Now, a five mile run is "short" and I am running at a 12 minute mile or even 11.5 minute mile pace. I'm not fast by any stretch of the imagination, but I ran a 10k in decent time for training purposes, I completed 10 miles the other day, and I intend to complete the half. My pace has improved dramatically, and I am excited to see how I do on Sunday. Who knows, with progress like this, maybe I'll make this a habit and try to complete another one soon, with a better time?

The next obstacle to tackle, however, is my eating. I am not beating myself up about that right now, since I am DEFINITELY more fit than I was six weeks ago, and am very proud of the morning workout routine I have developed; however, that is next. I can't justify eating the wrong foods (and too much of them), no matter how much I work out. Besides, what a waste of getting up at the butt crack of dawn and kicking my ass with a workout!

Phase two of this journey will be focused on better eating habits. I have 3 months until my 30th birthday, and only 6 weeks until I take an amazing trip to Costa Rica with my bff! That's 6 whole weeks of opportunity to treat my body better and get ready for an awesome trip experience.

Weak One

Alright, so Week One of boot camp and 1/2 marathon training is complete (well, almost - I still have a 7 mile run to tackle this weekend, which should be interesting). This week I found out that I am, unfortunately, weak. My muscles are out of shape and I was extremely sore after boot camp workouts. I like to consider myself an athletic person, a tough girl, someone who can compete with the boys; however, this week proved otherwise. I won't let this discourage me, as I fully intend on resolving this issue and regaining strength and fitness, but I will admit that attending boot camp twice this week and running 3-4 miles two times really knocked some sense into me. I was in denial about my fitness level and where it had dropped to. I didn't want to admit that I had gained nearly 20lbs in the past year. Who wants to admit that?! My too-tight clothes proved it. The scale reflected it. I refused to listen. "I can eat whatever I want, I have lots of muscle." Surrrre.

Now, granted, I care what I look like. I want to look as good as I can. More importantly, however, I care how I FEEL. And I did not feel good. Not in my clothes, not in my own skin. And I most certainly did not feel good when I was the last person to complete her exercises at boot camp, or the slowest one jogging the laps. I am not used to being that girl.

The good news is, I can control this. I will continue to work hard and push myself, and I will improve. I lost about 4lbs this week, which is a great start. And even though this doesn't solve my fitness or weight goals, it is a step in the right direction, and is highly motivating. Plus, I already feel better. I'm walking taller, I'm happier, and I know that I have what it takes inside me to push myself to get to where I want to be. I made small choices all week - getting up at 5 so I could work out, drinking tea instead of coffee - to get these results. I need to remember that just like I saw results this week for a reason, when I don't see results, it's for a reason. This is what I will carry with me to make it through the next 3 weeks of shOctober!

(p.s. a big shout out to my bff and my mom, who are going to boot camp and running with me, which is a HUGE motivator!)

shock-tober

It's that time - it's October, my favorite month, a chill is in the air, the holidays are right around the corner . . . oh, yeah, and I spent way too much time traveling and partying this summer, and collected a few extra pounds in the process. That means it's time to whip my ass into shape. I am committing to myself NOW, before my "old" birthday gets here and I feel just that: old. I refuse to enter my 30's feeling like crap. Instead, I want to get into the best shape of my life and show that birthday who's boss! So tomorrow, I'm starting bootcamp with my mom and bff, and am running a friggin' half marathon on November 13th! My crazy 51 year old mother wants me to run with her, and if she can do it, I should be able to do it, right? Ugh, what have I gotten myself into . . . Needless to say, I'm very excited and ready to make time for myself. I have to run to train (the other option is to be horribly pathetic and miserable at the half!), and have a full month of bootcamp to look forward to. In addition, I have 16 - count them, 16 - yoga sessions left to use, and I plan to use one a week until they are gone. It makes ME feel better when I do these things, and I need to make myself a priority now, because things are never going to get less busy or hectic. If I make myself a priority now, and get to the point where I crave the workouts and the yoga and such, I will be that much better for it in the long run. It's time to shock my body back into shape.

This posting is my pledge to start making myself a priority. What better month than October, my favorite? I have 4 months (and a week) until my 30th birthday. I can get in pretty good shape by then -- all I need is continued discipline and motivation.

Bring it on.

from goldilocks to happily ever after?

wow. a lot can change in a few short months.

rewind back to my last post, right when I decided to get back in the online dating game. I bought a six month subscription to match.com and was planning to passively peruse it on occasion, and to see who reached out to me. Who would've thought that a mere two days later, I would have a "coffee date" (meaning a few beers at gordon biersch to watch march madness final four games) that turned into a live-in boyfriend whose 16 lb. cat also lives with us.

In addition to meeting my new man, who we will call "Big J," or simply, "J," for blog purposes, I am in the middle of a job transition, have seen no fewer than five couples get married this year, and in six short months or so, will be an auntie for the first time!!! Top that all off with turning the big 3-0 next February (T-5.5 months!), and there is a lot going on. While some of it -- ok, a lot of it--is stressful, much of it is fun and exciting as well. Instead of lamenting how I can't find a decent guy out there, I am dealing with integrating someone into my once independent life, as well as integrating him into my family and circle of friends (not an easy task, as it turns out). Rather than continuing in the rat race as I was doing, I took a leap and am looking for something different, and although I know it will turn out to be for the better, that doesn't make it any less challenging now.

The bottom line is that all the craziness that has been 2010 this year, including putting my dog down (sad), setting dating and relationship boundaries (challenging, yet necessary), taking a leap to a new career path (scary and exciting), will all be worth it because they are all steps toward my happily ever after. And while that is still a ways away, it is, of course, more about the journey than the destination -- or at least just as much about the journey as the destination. I'm happy to report that the journey is still intriguing, changing, and leading me toward happily ever after one day at a time.

call me the goldilocks of dating

So, with some reluctance, I have reentered the online dating world. I am doing so with the previous online dating experience and a certain idea of do's and don'ts in my back pocket so we'll see how it goes. It wasn't until after I had already signed up that I looked into that whole "active singles" thing, where you go do fun activities like kayaking and paint-balling and pub crawls with other single people in order to meet and mingle, rather than have awkward email and telephone exchanges leading up to an awkward date. I think that would be fun to do at some point, too.

For now, match.com is relatively easy because I just go to work all day, and come home to winks and emails in my inbox, and can pick and choose. Over the last two and a half weeks that I've been back on, however, I noticed that I don't pick and choose - I mostly say "no thanks" to people because there's something "off" with a lot of the guys who decide to contact me. Feeling a little badly about this (but not too badly), I wondered what this was about.

Online dating poses an interesting issue that in-person dating does not. First, there is a virtual limitless supply of people you can connect with, and people that you would never meet in real life, because you have nothing in common (or because the cyber-geek actually never leaves his home). You basically peruse dating "resumes" of candidates, browsing through the pictures and "likes" of people until one catches your eye. My problem? Not many catch mine.

In real life, you strike up conversation and get butterflies in your stomach when there is chemistry--you can tell if there is nothing there, or if something is off. And if you meet someone you have great chemistry with, say at a concert, you're going to pay attention to the chemistry first, and the person's specific characteristics later. Online, however, you consider the separate characteristics (interests - the ones they choose to list, that is - appearance, etc.) before you even know whether there is chemistry! Because of this, I have decided that when dating online, I am allowed to be incredibly picky - it's like shopping, or hiring an employee. I can only judge based on the two-dimensional information I am presented with online. This means that I can be shallow and say "no thanks" to someone who has no picture, or who appears completely un-photogenic, or took a shirtless self-photograph of themselves in the bathroom. I can also say "no thanks" if he's too fat, or too skinny, if he's too ugly, or too pretty, if he's too dorky and shy, or too macho and egotistical. Basically, if there is something I don't consider "just right," I have permission to immediately reject the guy.

Go ahead, call me Goldilocks. That's the privilege of online dating.

setting boundaries

I'm not a big fan of new year's resolutions, but this year I kind of decided that I would try setting boundaries for myself.

I didn't do a great job at the start of 2010 - I continued to talk to modesto, albeit half-heartedly because some things he had said over the holidays made me see (again) that he was never going to motivate and allow our phone-lationship to progress. I also let sales guy (a guy I met in october who seemed pretty cool until I found out he was an immature douchebag of a man-boy) take advantage of my niceness for a few weeks into 2010. That all ended when he called, drunk, asking for a ride home or for me to pick him up so he could crash in my car because he'd missed the train from sf to sj. I stood my ground (thanks to some prodding from my bff), and was surprised that sales guy actually wasn't mad at me later, but thought I was mad at him, and apologized. Damn straight! Finally. Bottom line on sales guy, though, is that it was yet another dead end. It did, however, remind me that I needed to set boundaries going forward (since I hadn't set those when I met him in the Fall of '09, however, it was difficult to add them with him).

With that in mind, I also ended things with modesto. I really wasn't ready for them to end, but had they really ever started? We hadn't progressed in 16 months of knowing each other. Sure, I'd dated other people, but I still had him on the back burner, and could count on him to satisfy a major emotional void that I have without a "relationship." I finally decided that I needed to be honest with him - and myself - and to tell him that I wanted and needed more, and that either he was going to have to give that to me, or admit that he was unwilling to do so and that was that. Unfortunately, it ended up being the latter. Modesto thought we lived too far from each other, he had originally been too scared of ruining the great thing we had to take it any further, he thought too much time had passed as us being phone friends and something had changed, he wasn't ready for a relationship, etc., etc., etc. Lots of excuses. Lots of signs of fear and immaturity. Lots of things, but one bottom line: modesto and I weren't going anywhere.

Modesto still wanted to be friends, though. Because why would modesto want to have me mad at him? Why would he want his self-proclaimed "best friend" and the person who he's "had the best connection with in his life" out of his life completely? Why would modesto want to tell the "first person [he] told his friends and family about" good riddance? Yeah, well, he wouldn't want to do that. He just didn't want to have a relationship with me, either. So I decided that I needed to set my boundaries, and tell him about them. It sucks that setting those boundaries for myself means that I don't get to talk to my best friend anymore, either. I can't - it will be too hard, and I won't be 100% honest with myself about what he and I have (or don't have) if I continue to use him as an emotional crutch. And so, here we are. To me, the worst part is that he admits we are best friends and have more in common/a better connection than anyone else we've met. To add insult to injury, he even said:

I like you as a friend, and love you as a person.

I just don't think he gets it. He must have a wall up--he certainly has his own boundaries--"I can't be in a relationship with the new house and new job," "I don't have time to put into a relationship what I want to." Ok, fine, if you get to decide that you just "can't" do these things, then I get to decide that I just "can't" be your friend.

somewhere between a booty call and an 'elationship' . . .

. . . lies an honest to goodness relationship with a man who has a shred of maturity, self-confidence, and respect for others.

'booty call': a late night summons -- often made via telephone -- to arrange clandestine sexual liaisons on an ad hoc basis.


'elationship': a couple (friends, lovers, whatever) that know each other only via online correspondence (e-mail, IM chats, video rooms, etc). See, e.g. this timely article at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35338085/ns/technology_and_science-love_in_the_digital_age/from/ET