Eventually I'd like to write about the utter whirlwind that has been the past 10 months (Jackson! job! marriage! puppy! med school! grown-up life! so! many! things!), but for now I'm just going to jump in and write about the things on my brain.
I've never been very good at resolutions. Last year I set really vague "resolutions" in the hope that a general movement towards being a better person would be easier than trying for (and probably failing at) something very specific. Which, okay, was a fine thought. I did a lot, maybe even all the things on my list. But to what degree? Did I do them fully? What would fully even be?
This year I was inspired by one of my current favorite blogger, Elise Blaha, to do something different. Elise made it a goal to run (at least) a mile every day between Thanksgiving and New Year's, and kept up with it by instagramming photos each day. So I decided to take her idea and run with it on a slightly larger/adjusted scale.
For each month of 2013, I plan to focus on something different, and spend time EVERY DAY doing that thing. Run, clean, make, read, write, cook, stretch, think... I've got ideas but I think I'll decide at the beginning of each month what the new goal will be. In January I went with the most obvious: run at least a mile a day, just like Elise did. I wanted to take that on for a few reasons. One, oh my god I ate a bajillion things and drank at least a few barrels of wine while at my parents for the holidays, and getting into a running habit—even a simple one—couldn't hurt. Two, we now have a really, really large dog (more on that later) and we had gotten a bit out of the habit of taking him on adequate walks and runs once the weather turned bad. I wanted to get back in the habit of taking him out every day.
So how did I do?
I ran 29 times in the 31 days of January. I actually only logged 28 days (the last day I ran in the morning and again at night, to sneak another one in), and I actually only really, literally ran 27 days (one day it was wayyyyy too rainy and cold and miserable, so I did p90x). But I made an effort to be active 29 times and that's what I'm counting. I also use the term "ran" pretty loosely here. Since I took Teddy puppy along most of the time, my actually running was somewhat fragmented. As a large dog is wont to do, Teddy would often run a couple blocks and then stop to pee/sniff everything/look at other dogs/watch squirrels/whatever else dogs do. So we didn't exactly log a swift pace.
But part of the point of my new resolutions is that its about the effort. I'm not going to beat myself up over the three days I didn't go for a run (and I didn't at the time either) and I'm not going to worry that I didn't log any great times. I wanted to make running with Teddy a part of my daily habit, and I did. I've continued to go for runs and walks nearly every day after January ended.
I also really enjoyed taking and instagramming photos of the project. It became a creative outlet within the resolution, trying to make each photo a little bit different. It might make my instagram feed boring as hell, but I'll probably continue that aspect throughout the year. I'll take the motivation wherever I can find it.
My February project is #conquerclutter, which I am finding more difficult for several reasons. 1) I am so not a cleaner. 2) It's vaguer, as far as timeframe and goal (I'm trying to fix that by choosing specific areas to focus on going forward). and 3) The photos are less uniform, so its not as much fun to instagram—yes, this shouldn't be a factor, but it is. The creative miniproject aspect isn't quite as present on this one.
We'll see how the rest of 2013 goes. I'm proud of January's progress. No matter what happens going forward, this has been one of my most successful resolutions in years and years.
