Resolution. . . and Execution

Every year, I make New Year’s resolutions.  I haven’t written them down in who knows how long, but I do make them in my head.  Furthermore, I generally make the same resolutions every year. . . which says something about how successful I am about keeping them.  Losing weight and doing a better job of being on time have been there for at least thirty years, and I’ve added writing goals over the past few: finishing my third book has been a thing for about six years now, and writing a blog entry every week has been on the list for the past three or four.

We are now forty-one days into 2021. . . and for the most part, when it comes to these resolutions, I’m in epic fail territory.  (I wish I had added “Read at least twenty books” to that list because I’ve been on a major reading tear of late.  In fact, I may have already read twenty by now.)

I’ve probably done a little bit better with not being as late to work, but that’s not saying much.  I have actually made decent progress on the book – over thirty pages worth, to be specific – but it’s a long way from finished.  And considering that at six weeks in, this is my first blog entry?  Yeah, that’s pretty bad.

Where I have dropped the ball the most, though, is in the losing weight department, and it’s truthfully the one in which I need most to make progress.  Although I really don’t think I’ve been eating any differently, been any more stressed, or been any more sedentary, I’ve still picked up about ten pounds since the beginning of quarantine last year.  More accurately, I’ve picked up about ten pounds since about the middle of quarantine last year because I more or less maintained the same weight for the first month or so.  Facts are facts, though:  we all reach stages in our lives at which our metabolism shifts into a lower gear, and pounds sneak up on us.  It happened to me around age thirty and again around age forty. . . and I’ve hit another one of those stages over the past couple of years.  As the fall progressed last year, it became increasingly harder to ignore that my clothes just weren’t fitting as comfortably as they once did, and I stepped on the scales for the first time in a while.  I’m not going to share with the class what number I saw – for now, that information is between the Lord, Claude, and me – but I will say that the last time I saw numbers like that, I was carrying another human being around inside my body.  (To be clear, I gained less than fifteen pounds with both pregnancies, but still. . . . )

So. . . this evening, after stepping on the scales this morning and seeing that I seem to be in a nasty holding pattern on the scales, I finally sucked it up and headed to the walking track for the first time in months.  What should be motivating me is my health.  It’s not as if I’m not well aware that I’m less than five years younger than my dad was when he had to have his first heart bypass surgery and less than ten years younger than he was when he had a heart attack and his second bypass surgery.  Honesty compels me to point out, though, that my health is somewhere below sheer vanity and the fact that I don’t want to have to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe on my list of reasons for wanting to shed this weight.  The fact that dropping about sixty pounds would be good for my health is a definite bonus, though.

The biggest question I have any time I go to the track to walk after a long break from doing so is how long I’ll last.  As anybody who knows me can tell you, I walk pretty fast for a middle-aged woman with ridiculously short legs, which in turn means that I tend to start out at a relatively decent pace even after a long walking hiatus.  What does take more time, though, is building endurance.  If I start out trying to push to 10,000 steps right off the bat, I’m a complete mess afterward and don’t necessarily feel like walking from my bedroom to the bathroom the next day.  The trick is to have 10K as a goal but to listen to my body when it’s telling me that I’ve pushed hard enough for one outing. . . which generally means one lap beyond when I’m starting to feel winded.  Having also read about what even mild cases of COVID (which mine was) have done to some people’s lungs, I wondered if I’d notice myself getting winded more easily than I had in the past when I was getting back into the swing of walking for exercise.  Not knowing the answer to that question made it hard for me to imagine just how I’d do this first time out.

The results?  I started to hit the wall at about thirty-five minutes and pushed through one more lap after that.  After thirty-eight minutes, I’d walked 2.4 miles at a pace of 15.8 minutes per mile, or about 3.8 miles per hour – and although I was a little bit winded, I still could have carried on a conversation easily enough if someone had been in the car with me on the way back home.  And as usual, I felt really good after the walk and asked myself why it had taken me so long to drag myself back out to do it. 

Few things speak to the idea of “the life imagined” more than do New Year’s resolutions; after all, we’re imagining ways in which we can make our lives better by achieving goals that will improve us, our lives, or both.  The problem comes in the execution, in transforming those ideas into reality.  This evening, I finally literally took steps toward making the thinner – and yes, healthier – self that I’m imagining a reality. . . and on more than one level, I’m feeling pretty good about that.

And as of now, I’m one blog entry down. . . and fifty-one to go!