New Year Commitments

Happy New Year! Here are my New Year's Eve update and my New Year resolutions commitments.

'Tis a new year and a new chance to start over. It's time to buckle down and get the job done. This is a picture from June. Every time I look at it, I'm so embarrassed that I let myself get so big. Since then, I've lost about 20 lbs, and I will be losing 50 more by May.

Current stats
Weight: 195 lbs
Run: 18 minutes at 15 min/mile
Push-ups: 10 max
Crunches: 10 max

New Year Commitments (to be accomplished by June 1)
Weight: 145 lbs
Run: 21 minutes at 7 min/mile (no less than 25 minutes at 8.3 min/mile)
Push-ups: 100 max
Flexed Arm Hang: 70 seconds
Crunches: 100 in 2 minutes
Heart: Believe in myself and push myself to be the person I know I can be
Edit: How could I have forgotten the most important resolution?? Become a Marine!!!

I will post another picture at 175, and again at 150.

Merry Christmas

I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season.
The photo below is from 2006, but it's hilarious nonetheless.

Paintball!

I played paintball for the first time today. It was a blast. The first couple rounds I got out pretty quick , but then I started to do better and I moved around a lot so it was good exercise, too. There were other girls there, and they pretty much found a spot out of the way and hid there until the game was over. Most of them didn't get hit at all, but one made the mistake of finding her spot and staying there when she was the only girl on her team. When the game was almost over, she was the only one on her team left, and she got swarmed. That was the end of her day. But I had a ton of fun and it's something I wouldn't mind doing a couple times a month, for sure.

This last week has been absolutely miserable for me. I "intended" to get up early pretty much every day and run, but I never did. I'll be glad when Daylight Savings comes around again. It was much easier to get out and run when I could do it right after work. It's so hard for me to get up when I sleep like crap the night before (I realize I'll have to get up early when I'm in the Marines, but I'm counting on the fact that I'll be tired enough to sleep and there won't be so many extenuating circumstances keeping me awake.) I also decided to move closer to home so I can see my family more. I'm banking on the fact that if I do end up joining the Marines, I'll have more than 5 days vacation... I've told work, but I haven't told my roommate yet. I don't know how he'll react.

Something I was thinking about is maybe enlisting instead of becoming an officer. I'll make so much less, and my degree will be absolutely worthless, but I don't know if I'll physically be capable of being accepted before I'm too old. My birthday was the 10th, and I'm 27 now. I still have a lot of weight to lose, and I can't even run for 30 minutes straight yet (much less run 3 miles). Plus, there's an enlisted recruiter right around here, where as the officer recruiter is a good 45 minutes away. I don't know. There's too much to think about right now.

I also want a dog.

Home Again

Well, I made it back to Florida (sitting in the airport in Orlando, waiting on the shuttle to take me to Ocala right now). I didn't get any running in (which sucks), but I did get new running shoes that will hopefully help with the hip pain I've been having recently, and I got a lot of other exercise. It snowed a good bit while I was home, so I got some shoveling in, which is a good workout, and we went hiking in the woods in the snow a couple times. I also helped clean the barn (can you say 'ew'?), and that's definitely good exercise.

One thing I realized when I was home is how much I've missed. My mom was mad at my aunt for awhile, so I didn't see some of my cousins for a couple years. One of them (Jeremy), I was really close to for a long time. He was the cutest thing (he would serenade me with songs from Lonestar) and I used to go watch him play pee-wee football. Man, that kid could run. I hadn't seen him for years, though, until I saw him again on Saturday at the family Christmas party. He grew up so much. He's 14 now (I think), tall, and handsome as ever. I'm really tempted to move back closer to home so I can see those guys more than once a year at Christmas (with five vacation days a year, and no sick days, more than that really isn't feasible at this point).

Reading: This trip was very good for reading. I finished Fields of Fire on the trip up. I almost cried on the plane. Sometimes I think I get too attached to characters in books...Anyway, I read Generation Kill after that and just finished it about 20 minutes ago. I didn't realize it was about the same group of guys from One Bullet Away until I started it. I loved reading about them all again, from a different perspective. If you haven't read them, I definitely recommend doing so.

Going Home

I'm going home to visit my family this coming week. It'll be nice to have the time off and just get away. I'll also be doing a lot more exercise, since I'll have time to run in the mornings, plus my mom likes to walk in the afternoon. It'll be a LOT colder, though, so that might make it a bit harder.

Money's quite tight right now, which is really stressful, but I think that can be mitigated a bit by taking the on-call phone for work a bit more than I currently do.

Reading: Currently, I'm reading Fields of Fire. It's quite good.