MagpieApproved: Just Keep Swimming!

Along with all the hand made goodness that has been consuming my life for the last couple of months I’ve decided it was time to give myself the gift of a lighter smaller stronger me.

I’ve always been very hands on in the construction of our house. When we started building it was really no different, I was very hands on and adamant about being environmentally conscious with the products we used. Having a big house made it even more so important as it’s a bigger footprint to be responsible for. I even went so far as to source standing dead timber for our logs.

Not wanting to use any more chemicals than absolutely necessary I opted for borate treating my sill plates over the arsenic filled pressure treated lumber for the basement. This meant my personally coating each piece of lumber with borate and while I was flipping 16 foot boards so I could coat the other side I tripped over a stack of boards the builder had set behind me. I went down, now maybe I would’ve been able to save myself had I not been holding a 16 foot board but all I could think of at the time was not braining myself with it so I held on. I held on as I felt the pop, I held on as I felt the burn. I held on as I hit the stack of lumber and slid sideways to the ground.

My knee has never been the same and every time I’ve tried to get back to the gym or start running again my knee would tell me about. I’ve always been all out and gung ho so at first I thought I just needed a little more time to heal. Then I started gaining weight and the extra weight made it ache and I’d try to get back to the gym. Creating my own special downwards spiral. The more I tried, the more it hurt, the more I didn’t try, the more it hurt.

After several false starts - if you’ve been reading my blog for a long time you might even remember reading about some of them. I finally decided I needed this to be about the long term, slow and steady. No more all in or go home. That attitude had me going home and not achieving my goals - I don’t like not achieving goals. If I was going to make this happen I needed to allow myself to go at a slower pace. But going at a slower pace meant I needed some accountability, some one to keep me on track and give me a nudge every so often.

Every night as I drift off to sleep I think of the things I am grateful for. Special blessings of the day, some ordinary, some small, some big, reminders of the many things and people who are the good in my life. Sometimes I release things to the Universe, leave it up to God’s hands if you will. On this night I decided to release it and just do but I could use a little accountability to help me along. The next morning I had an e-mail from Bill Phillips on being over 50 and getting back to the gym, a challenge and a FB group to help keep you accountable. Believe it or not I had to take a couple days to think about it! My own personal GodWink as my friend Chris would say, and “well I just don’t know”…. I asked my son if he might like to be my work out buddy, he was my best buddy when he was 4. He and the kiddo had been working out together in the University gym but she graduated and he didn’t want to go alone so he’d been working out in our gym in the basement and hinting he needed someone to help keep him on track too. Make that a double wink.

So! Here we are about 5 or 6 weeks in, my scale hasn’t budged much but my measurements are shrinking, my clothes are fitting looser, my face is slimmer, I have a lot more energy and I’m a lot happier. My knee only hurt until I realized, it was the wrong knee and it was all in my head - just a little psychological self sabotage, a body at rest tends to stay at rest until a greater force comes along to change that.

But, a body in motion tends to stay in motion. Quoting Dori, Just keep swimming!

My 25th anniversary is coming up this next year…. I’m thinking Jamaica sounds like just the place to be for that!

Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming swimming swimming!