2013 Lessons: When to Push and When to Let Go

I’ll admit, there’s parts of blogging I’m totally over, especially writing posts that feel forced, like Thanksgiving and Christmas posts. Do you really care about my Christmas when everyone else in your reader is writing about their Christmas? Probably not.

I try to be as real as possible on the blog, while not dwelling on the bad, but last year, the idea of a year-in-review sorta post felt so freaking forced to me. Yeah, there were some good times in 2012, but I was still in the midst of some STUFF in the beginning of 2013 and just didn’t have it in me to put that happy face on. I was in St. Croix, and I was trying my best to unplug and be in the moment of a beautiful vacation.

stcroix

I was lucky enough to have the best friends in the world who took me to Puerto Rico to celebrate my 30th.

Immediately after I got back from Puerto Rico, things changed very quickly in my life, and I went through a long, difficult job search.

Through these months, I learned when to push, push, push through my life, and when I had to let go. Let me tell you, it’s so much easier to push than it is to let go.

But I credit a great therapist, yoga and meditation with teaching me when to let go, and I found the first two through sheer luck. Thank you ZocDoc for helping me find a great therapist the same day I wanted an appointment without calling every therapist in the city and potentially waiting weeks to see one, and thank you Laughing Lotus for helping me learn to let go. I freaking love that place, and I can’t say enough good things about it.

I pushed, pushed, pushed to get a HUGE PR at the D.C. Half. (Thank you to RB Fiona for being by my side for it!)

I pushed, pushed, pushed to get through my open-water fear at the Franklin Lakes Triathlon.

I tried to push, push, push as running through the hot summer felt impossible…but then I just had to let it go. I could push against something that wasn’t changing, or I could embrace it and just go through it.

As I let it go, it slowly started getting easier.

One particularly harrowing day in the job search, I called Emily, frustrated beyond belief. I did a fair amount of whining but trying to stay strong, and I’ll never forget what she said: “you don’t have to be strong. It’s okay to cry.” I started blubbering, and I felt so much better getting a good cry out. She also said something about letting go, and I fought back and then realized I sorta had to, at least for a few days.

I did, and you know what? I found the posting for my current job just three days later, and I am so incredibly happy with it. Sometimes that cheesy stuff people say about things happening for a reason and things being worth the wait is true.

After running the Philly Half and having some Real Talk with Meggie, I was still really focused on my goal, obviously, but I also tried so much harder to let the fun back in and run more relaxed, rather than fight and berate myself if I didn’t hit goal pace. And, OH HEY, sub-4, and I did NOT bust.

It’s worth also noting that for as many times as I’d tried in the past to make myself a Person Who Liked Yoga or a Person Who Liked Strength Training, forcing myself never helped. But this year? I fell in love with yoga, and I found an amazing community of people at Uplift, and I really enjoy strength training now and, whoa, miss it when I take a few days off.

2013? You ended on a fabulous, fabulous note, but good lord, did you teach me a lot of lessons along the way.

I’m so, so thankful for good friends, good family and an awesome friend/coach who put up with all my #runcrazy to get me to two awesome big PRs.

What did you learn about yourself in 2013? What did you discover once you started letting go?

(On a side note about meditation, my girl Heather released her own meditation album yesterday! Go check it out. I supported her KickStarter, so I downloaded it yesterday but haven’t listened yet.)

FitBit Flex Review

A few days before Christmas break, one of my coworkers was walking around handing out FitBit Flexes to all of us.

Were we beta testing something? Were we reviewing it?

Nope, just a company Christmas present.

SWEET!!

I’d sort of thought of asking for some sort of tracker for Christmas. Yeah, I work out, but how (in)active am I really the rest of the day? I walk to work and back, but I sit at a desk for 9-10 hours a day, rarely even leaving for lunch.

But how accurate are they? Would I get really sick of it after a day? A week?

I’d thought about asking for the Nike Fuelband SE for Christmas, but that was basically just because it looked cool. It measures your activity based on a semi-arbitrary number, but I would want real-world numbers in my fitness tracker, like steps or miles.

FitBit Flex

But since I didn’t pick it, I can’t really be choosy!

And while I generally am pretty active both in working out and in general lifestyle (thank you NYC and walking everywhere), it’s a good reinforcement of healthy habits.

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If not another way for me to be competitive…

The app shows you this leaderboard of how you compare with your friends for steps.

It gives you a goal of 10,000 steps, which is a general guideline of healthy activity. I’ve heard that if you’re already pretty active, 15,000 steps is a good goal, but I’m okay with setting the bar low right now.

If I walk both ways to work and go for a run, I easily surpass 10,000+ steps. Some days, I take the bus one way if it’s cold, and if I happen to do a strength-based workout like Uplift or one of our workouts at work, I might not get to 10,000, but I generally do fairly easily in the city.

This week, in NJ for the holidays, I’ve found it much harder to meet my goal with more time in the car. On Christmas Day, I didn’t even reach 5,000 steps. Thursday, I took a yoga class, and I only reached 4,000 steps. I wish that there was some sort of 1 hour of yoga=x steps formula, but at the end of the day, it’s a really, really fancy pedometer. While writing this, I looked up to see if that was the case, and there is an option to separately input activities, though I think its estimate that I burned 91 calories is liiiitle low.

Looking at my FitBit data over the course of this past week, I’ve been really thankful that I live in the city and can get lots of built-in activity without really thinking about it. I likely won’t live in the city forever, and this really solidifies that I’d one day want to live in a town that has at least some areas I can walk to.

I’m still in NJ but went back into the city this morning to lead the JuicePress run, and I took a bath when I came back and fell asleep in the bathtub. So, it can be submerged for at least a little while and come out okay. (And apparently, the same can be said for me.) I also regularly shower in it, and it’s fine.

Below this, it also shows calories burned, which for me, is more of a nice to know. I despise tracking calories (although I may do so this week for Tina’s Get Healthy, Stay Healthy Challenge to be a bit more cognizant of just what I’m eating…), but that’s also an option within the system.

I also wish you could see how many steps you’ve taken right on the device. While the app is awesome, and I check it fairly obsessively, it’d be nice to see on my wrist. (Apparently the FitBit Force lets you do so.) It lets you track sleep, too, but you have to tell it via the app that you’re going to sleep, so it doesn’t confuse that with the other time you’re spending inactive.

Do you have a FitBit or other fitness tracker? How do you track your fitness/activity?

P.S. If you’re on there connect with me here: http://www.fitbit.com/user/227DSS (The interface to find people totally confuses me.)