The major upside for me was that the program involves 12 sessions with a trainer in a small group (4 people) for much much less than I would pay for just 12 sessions with a trainer outside the program. I’ve never worked out with a trainer before, so I thought this would be a good way to kickstart my weight loss and get in shape, and try out the whole trainer thing before I invested money into sessions of my own.

So far, it’s been pretty good, although I am so sore all of the time! That’s what I signed up for, though.

Last Tuesday, we had our initial weigh in and some fitness tests: pushups for 1 min, situps for 1 min, and 1 mile as fast as you can. I managed a whopping 6 (girl!) pushups, 17 situps, and 15:48 for my mile (mostly walking). Then on Thursday, our first real workout. So far, all the trainer workouts have been in the aerobics studio because our session is at 8:00am and there are no classes in there at that time. Melissa (my trainer) says this is a great advantage because the other teams don’t get to work out in there, but I think she just likes making us do exercises for the whole length of the studio!

I ended up doing 3 days of cardio last week, too, for 1 hour, which I thought was what I was supposed to be doing but then Melissa told me I should do 5-6 days for 30-45 minutes. I was also doing it at too high of a heart rate, so hopefully this week is better.

One of the hardest parts has been the food tracking. I have always liked to eat. Food tastes good! And so I always eat too much of it. We have been using MyFitnessPal to log food and exercise. It’s so easy to eat a big Panera Bread cookie or something even when know that you shouldn’t really eat it, but when you have to write it down and see that your pool of calories for the day shrinks, it really makes you reconsider it.

I had thought this whole program was just for getting in shape, not really a competition like the TV show, but I found out today it is a competition and there are prizes! I don’t know what all of them are yet but I think there’s some trainer sessions and a heart rate monitor in there.

Last year ended with not quite as much momentum as I had been gaining in the early fall.  I did not enter my 5K race in November.  I ran into a wall in my C25K training program, and then I fell back into some old habits, wherein I would get busy with work and put off going to the gym when 2:30pm rolled around.  For almost 6 weeks, I did the program faithfully.  I did 2 repetitions of Week 1, then I did Weeks 2, 3, 4, and 2/3 of Week 5 mostly like I was supposed to.  I never quite made it all the way through the last run each day.  There was always 30-60 seconds where I’d have to stop and take a breather walk, but I did the program every day I was supposed to.  But then I hit Week 5.  Week 5 is the first week where the running ramps up every day instead of doing the same set all 3 days.  Day 1 is 3 sets of 5 min running, with 3 min walk in between.  Day 2 is 2 sets of 8 min running with a 5 min walk in between.  Then Day 3 is the hard one:  20 min of running without stopping.  I knew that I was not ready for that, so my plan was to just keep alternating the first 2 days until I was able to do it.  That worked for about 2 weeks, then I started letting work and life get in the way, and only made it to the gym once a week if I was lucky.

Exercising regularly and getting in shape and losing weight continues to be a goal for 2010.  I still want to run in 5K’s again, and I still want to do a triathlon someday, even though I can’t really swim.  And someday maybe I’ll make it to the Boston Marathon, which I’ve wanted to do since high school.

On the home front, anyone who has been to our house knows that we’re pretty lazy and messy people.  My mom claims that my messiness is her fault, because she never made me clean my room growing up.  I don’t really know if that is true, but I am a pretty messy person.  I have an amazing ability to let crap pile up all around me and totally tune it out.  Combined with the fact that I hate to throw things away (they might be useful someday you know!), and I’m probably half on my way to being on that Hoarders show.  I can also be a bit of a perfectionist.  I know this seems like a rather odd combination for someone with a messy house, but the thought process I usually go through is “I should clean the house, it’s a mess” to “it’s such a mess it will take me forever to clean” to “that’s too overwhelming to think about, so I’m going to go play some World of Warcraft/watch TiVo/read a book.”

I also feel like we have never treated this place as a “home” either.  We always intended to stay here in our townhouse for maybe 3-4 years, then get a single family house.  We’ve been here for 8 years now, though, and I don’t really see that changing soon.  Between the economy and work situations and the housing market, we can’t really afford to upgrade to a single family house.  But in all these years we’ve never really painted the walls that need painting, hung pictures, or anything like that.

So, investing some time and money into improving our house is also part of the 2010 plan.  We have gotten a pretty decent start on it so far, mostly because we were forced to, but hey, progress is progress!  Our basement is getting into pretty decent shape, thanks to some basement floods in the heavy rains over the past few years (water flows off the roof and collects around our basement window well in the back, filling it up and the water comes in around the window), which forced us to go through a lot of cardboard boxes in the unfinished storage section of the basement and throw things out that got soaking wet, and also thanks to some houseguests that we have had staying in the finished area, which forced us to clean up that section as well.  Another goal of mine has always been to improve the major appliances, as everything we have is original from 1987 when this place was built.  We were forced to replace the furnace this fall, as the heat exchanger was cracked.  While that was not an expense that I looked forward to, the outcome has been good, as now we have a super efficient, super quiet, modern furnace.

Those are my major goals for 2010, although I do have some smaller ones:

• I want to spend more time doing new things.  That’s pretty vague, but we tend to spend a lot of time at home playing video games.  This week I’m going to take a Wine 101 class at Dover Wine with Sara, and Sara and I went to a wine tasting party last Saturday with Christy!
• I want to read more books.  I used to read all the time when I was younger, and I still do read, but not nearly as much.  I hope to get some kind of ebook reader this coming year to help reduce the amount of clutter that is coming into the house.
• Get back into my genealogy project that I started a couple years ago.
• I have a lot of crap that I want to eBay or sell on Craigslist or something.  Most of it is either older computer parts or pristine unopened stamping supplies.
• I want to finish cleaning up, labeling, and uploading my photos from our cross country road trip that we took in June 2009.  I took about 1200 pictures over about 17 days, and I have only gone through and created albums for about 3 of them.  Our Grand Canyon pictures came out rather hazy due to the weather, and I keep wanting to see if there’s anything I can do to sharpen them up and make the colors more vivid, but that would require reading my iPhoto book that I got, and I keep putting it off, even though there’s plenty of other days of photos I could be doing in the meantime.  I’d like to show off our pictures to our friends and family before it’s been a year since we took the vacation.
• I want to travel more.  This is more of a longer term goal than a 2010 goal, I think, but we started doing “something different” this past spring by going on a cross country road trip instead of going to Walt Disney World like we usually do, and I would like to continue that.  I still love WDW but there’s other places I want to visit, too!  Hawaii and Europe are at the top of the list.  I’d love to visit Australia and New Zealand someday as well.  Maybe an Alaskan cruise.

Here’s to a new decade!

Why is 24:03 on my mind right now?  Well, I just finished my second week of the Couch to 5K program and I think that I am going to sign up for the Great Bay 5K even though I don’t know if I will be done the program by then.  I have a lot of weight to lose, and a lot of years of non-running to make up for, and I find myself just hoping that in a little less than 2 months, I’ll at least be able to beat the 54:51 time of the last place finisher last year.  I’ll try to ignore the fact that it was a 4 year old girl.

On top of that, the weather has been mostly crappy all summer, we’ve had some really LOUD and annoying painters working on our building for the past two weeks (which makes it hard to get work done!), our friend has been living with us for the past month until he moves to Phoenix, and our furnace needs to be put out to pasture.

Thankfully, the painters finished on our building on Friday (although they’re now sanding the one next door, but at least it’s not as loud as when it’s your building).  Our friend will be moving out in a few days, too.  It hasn’t been that bad with him living here.  We really hardly ever see him, but our place is kinda small and it’s just weird having another person living in it.  Hopefully the weather improves so we can turn off the AC and open up the windows!  Between the insane heat and humidity the past two weeks, plus the painters needing us to keep the screens out of the windows, we’ve had the house all shut up with the AC running.  Ben and I both hate AC for the most part, but it’s been really necessary.

I started back on my Couch to 5K plan two weeks ago, and I’m going to start Week 2 again today.  I usually end up doing several iterations of Week 1.  This is my fourth attempt now to do this plan!  The first two times, I never made it past Week 1.  Back in June, before we left for vacation, I made it to Week 2, and was hoping to be able to do it a few more times when we got back, but since I was sick for so long, I really got out of the gym habit.  As in not going at all, so I had to start over again.  I had hoped to do the Great Bay 5K at the end of October, but I just don’t know if I will be ready by then.