Dream It, Do It

Monday is travel day, which means I get up at 4:30am ET, fly to Dallas, and work until 8pm ET before heading to my hotel to settle in (we try to leave early on Mondays). Usually, I am exhausted by the time I get to the hotel, and so I have a quiet night of gym time + food delivery. Last night, though, my friend Blake invited me to her wonderful group Bachelor watching extravaganza – made extra exciting because it was the first episode of the season! Thanks to the fabulous snark on Television Without Pity (and now the addition of this great group of women with whom to watch the show), The Bachelor is one reality show I will never give up.

However, I arrived back at my hotel having still not worked out for the day. My January commitment was to work out for at least 10 minutes a day every day, no excuses – and I wasn’t about to fail on just day 7 of my challenge. (I say that now, but I’ll admit to spedning about 5 minutes planning a blog post in my head about how when you fail, you have to ignore the failure and just keep going instead of giving up entirely.)

But today is not the day for that blog post, because I did not give up just because I had a long day. Instead, I opened up my no-equipment workouts Pinterest board, chose one at random, and went for it. It took me 13:15 to complete it, at which point I was a very sweaty mess. 80 pushups will do that to you! I really liked how quickly this flew by, though, and I was even able to put on an episode of 30 Rock in the background since I didn’t need to watch a video to know what to do. Immediately after the workout, it was straight to bed – Flywheel in the morning. Challenge on track!

To celebrate the new year, the wonderful and inspiring staff at Flywheel Dallas put up a big bulletin board and encouraged riders to write down their resolutions and pin them up to the board. Since I already wrote an entire blog post about my 2013 resolutions, I thought it made more sense to make a new, Flywheel-specific goal. “My resolution is to do the entire arm song with BOTH weights.” (For those not in the Flywheel loop, one song of each class is devoted to arm work – you turn the resistance down, slow the pedaling, and then grab one or two weighted bars for shoulder presses, bicep curls, tricep dips, etc. Usually only one or two guys grab two bars, and the women always take just one bar – it is high reps and very tiring!)

Once I had written it down and seen it posted publicly on the wall, I had to go for it – so today when it came time for the arm segment, I picked up both bars. I figured I’d see how far into the arm routine I could last (it’s a specific number of reps in a set order), and that I could aim to go a little bit longer each class before dropping back down to one weight. But lo and behold, I made it to the end of the song without having to put the extra weight down! I guess the theme lately is that I don’t push myself hard enough, and I am capable of much more than I think I am.

I know I’ve repeated this ad nauseum, but I have such a great feeling about 2013, that this is the year I’m going to make everything wonderful and amazing happen. Now, I just need to push myself hard enough to really achieve something. It’s time to dream big!

Happy Tuesday, everyone, and don’t forget to enter my Earhoox giveaway if you missed it last night 🙂