Weekend Rewind and Monday Motivation

We've been a little indulgent this weekend following my shifts at work. I gave myself a hall pass to skip my runs since my workouts from last week combined with some pretty busy shifts had my body begging for a break. This break just happened to involve a little food/pub crawl in Decatur on Saturday night, including Brick Store Pub and Cakes & Ale. We may have eaten ourselves silly.

Cakes & Ale -- don't remember what it was called, so I'll name it "The Chocolate Gut Bomb".

Cakes & Ale -- Caramel Bundt Cake aka "The Caramel Gut Bomb"

As if that wasn't enough, we decided that for Sunday night, since we were already going out to finally see "The Avengers" (AWESOME, by the way), we'd do the whole dinner and a show thing and went to CineBistro. If you've never been to a theater that combines dining with the theater experience, you really need to. CineBistro, for one, is 21+ only after 6:00PM, which is fantastic if you don't want to be in a theater with a bunch of giggling teenagers who can't stop texting for two seconds (for the record, seeing a phone lit up in a dark theater is as annoying as hearing it ring). Another plus is that everything is in one spot, so if you're so inclined to eat a whole meal before or during your show, you save yourself the rush of driving first to a restaurant, then to the theaters. Also, the chairs are HUGE, and COMFY. My legs still felt like lead from work so I welcomed the chance to slouch and recline.

After all the food, beverage, and Robert Downy Jr. I could handle, it was time to get back to being good this morning. My body, now finished begging for rest and calorie-dense foods, was ready for some fruit and exercise!

Breakfast was early as I had a meeting/motivation seminar to attend at work. It's a two-part thing the company I work for hired an outside consultant to run. At first, I thought he was going to tell us how we suck and what we need to do to get better. But it wasn't like that at all. This guy was... intense. He was all about completely turning our minds inside out and forcing us to shift our paradigms, even those of us who claimed to have a pretty nice disposition to begin with (such as myself). I mean, he nearly made me cry... about four times. A lot of what our speaker had to talk about was gratitude and understanding, as well as living in the moment instead of walking around carrying the burdens of our past on our backs. And while the stories he had to share about cancer patients and wounded war vets broke my heart, I definitely got what he was driving at.

I left the meeting armed with several motivational quotes and mantras to meditate on for today's run:


If you don't know where you're going, it is impossible to get there.

You can not become the person you wish to be tomorrow if you make an excuse for not being that person today.

If you are happy 80% of the time, you will spend 80% of your time worrying about the other 20%.

Confidence is not built by doing only what we know to be safe.

You see, this guy is just a quote machine!

Armed with all of this motivation and inspiration, I left work for a flat and fast 8-miler at a nearby recreation along the Chatahoochie River. I always enjoy running here, not just for the reprieve from Atlanta's hills, but for the fact that I can feel somewhat removed from the choking congestion, horns, and exhaust of the city. Don't get me wrong, I love being a city runner, but when it's already hot and humid you I need a nice tree-lined path or road away from all the noise.

 
I thought a lot about living in the moment. We certainly did THAT this weekend. I still feel the residual guilt of calories consumed lingering at the back of my conscience. I thought about how lucky I am to have those moments of indulgence along with the will and desire to come back to doing something good for my body. I tried to identify anything from my past I still allow to hold me back. I rethought my approach to the grandiose goals for my future that are so intimidating I've held off on attempting to achieve them. I thought about our meeting, and a question the speaker posed to all of us, "Use two words you would want others to perceive you as."


I decided I want to be Funny and Fierce. Because I know exactly when I do or do not wish to be taken seriously. I want the liberty to talk about bodily functions and the grosser aspects of being a runner, but I want to be perceived as someone with the drive and conviction to be taken seriously as a trainer and an athlete.

FIERCE! Grrrrr.

So, enough dawdling from me. It's time to get serious about what I want to do and stop using excuses to hold myself back. Will I start a business from scratch like I wanted? No. Does that mean I should give up on getting a full-time job as a trainer? Absolutely not.

Step 1: Dusting off those ACE books....


What two words do YOU want others to think of, when they think of you?