I’m back… I wasn’t just being a lazy blogger although that would be a reasonable assumption. Dan and I went to Costa Rica for most of December as our honeymoon… We were gone so long I came home and couldn’t remember where I’d left my laptop and my i pad. When I found the former, there was a dead bug stuck in it. Ew. I still have lots of emails to go through and piles of laundry to do but for now I’m just going to update my blog, as part of my ritual Returning From Vacation New and Improved Self Project that will normally last anywhere from 1 to 10 days following a vacation of a week or longer. Which by the way, if you have never had the chance to leave your regular life for more than a week at a time, to just go somewhere where you can turn off your phone, not get on the internet, and let your days revolve around meals, happy hour, surfing lessons, zip line tours, raft trips, and the like, you should definitely do it.

Anyways, my typical post-vacation Self-Improvement Project usually sparks from my profound realization that on vacation I am far less likely to freak out about dumb things (ie why is our waitress slow, f-ing traffic, annoying people in coffee shops with especially loud voices but really bad attitudes and boring long-winded stories, etc), far more likely to be enjoying the present moment instead of trying to do eighty things at once or doing one thing but thinking about all the other crap I still haven’t done yet, and overall I am much more like the person I would like to be… easygoing (easygoing-ish, that is. it’s all relative), somewhat more patient, overall a more rested, happy version of myself. So I invariably resolve that when I get home I will do these things:
1- Turn phone off once in a while
2- Not check email obsessively. After all I did not look at it once in over 2 weeks and I never missed it.
3- Not check blogs so much (See number 2). Especially when supposed to be working.
4- Not hurry so much
5- Sleep more
6- Calm down in general, slow down and realize everything is not a big deal. In fact, hardly anything is.

Those are the basic aspects of my Self-Improvement Plan. In addition to the perpetual challenge which I face every day, to stop pressing snooze (so much).

So now I am back. I am faced with the challenges of trying to be do the above listed things. I also need to decide whether I want to train for and run the Providence Marathon on May 1 or not. If I am going to do it I need to start training soon. If I do it, the goal is 3:40 or die trying. Ok, not die, that it extreme. (See #6, above). But when I think of running another marathon, I am alternately excited about the prospects of being in great shape again, and of shaving some time off my previous PR (3:55 if anyone cares) and then being turned off by the inevitable early morning runs that make you feel so good (when they are done) yet are only begun by getting out of bed at an an ungodly hour (note chronic snooze button problem and general hatred of waking up, as noted above). And I have been toying with the idea of committing to a Crossfit club for a few months, instead of training for the marathon, just to try something different. The idea of doing nothing in particular has of course crossed my mind (ie the fitness regimen to which I currently subscribe however I use the term regimen loosely). This would mean doing whatever I felt like doing on any given day for a workout, but its hard for me to stay motivated without a goal and without motivation to improve my fitness, I feel sort of unsettled, for lack of a better word, and I really don’t like that. Of course I am motivated to some extent by the fact that I enjoy exercise for its own sake, for the social aspects it provides, for the stress relief, and obviously the damage control factor, as far as counterbalancing the ill effects of my less than ideal diet…. But there is nothing like the knowledge that every single workout is money in the bank that I am going to need to withdraw on race day to light a fire under my ass and push me out the door on cold dark mornings. I am leaning more toward the marathon as I write this… the jury is still out though. Any thoughts?