Success defined

Success does not come to you......You go to it.

With this statement I have found success. I have found the ability to push through even on the hardest of days. Sixteen short days from now I will wake up on a hopefully sunny day, dress in my sexy Tri shorts and head out to complete my first ever Triathlon. This day has been a long time coming and it will be a completion of a goal. A BIG goal!

I have been thinking about goals a lot lately. I have never really completed a goal that I can think of. Besides my goals of getting married and having kids, if you can call those goals. I have set many goals in my life but like many other things they have never been accomplished. Like the nursing degree I never got or all those diet goals that never shed those unwanted pounds.

Why is it that I have never accomplished a goal? I think my own fear has held me back from completing any sort of goal. The fear of my own body, fear of what people would say, fear of getting hurt and the fear of failure. However, something clicked inside my head/heart this year and suddenly I am not afraid of failing. 

On this goal journey I have learned a few things:

1. I want to compete & finish this Tri so bad I can almost taste it
2. Training for this Tri has been hard work & has taken more commitment than I thought
3. You have to mentally be ready to attack your goal
4. There will be good and bad days as you aim for your goal but you cannot let the bad days bring you all the way down

In January I decided to complete this Tri to prove to myself that I could do it and to show my children that you can do anything you set your mind to.  And by golly they have seen my blood, sweat & tears as I have trained the last few months.  With many  "Are we going to the Y again?",  "Mama are you going swimming or biking today?" and "You're sweaty mama" they have seen me working hard on this goal.

The morning of Sept 8th will bring me excitement, nerves and determination. And it will be all 3 that will carry me across that finish line to complete my first goal.

What's your goal? Do you have one? Why not?  What's holding you back from completing your goal?

You will never know your limits 

unless you push yourself

to them 

26 days and counting

The countdown till the Tri Tri Tri Again Triathlon is officially counting down. 26 days till I will swim 1/4 mile, bike 9miles and run 1.6 and finish a HUGE goal.

However, as the clock winds down I am getting nervous....no terrified better sums it up. Until this point I have been fine and constantly cheer leading my Tri buddies Briana and Karyn. But that all changed on Saturday when we went to watch the Lake Tye Triathlon.

As I stood there watching the competitors dolphin dive into the water, then run to their bikes & jump off to run I began to feel the butterflies. I began to want to throw up just a bit. The "What the H*#$ was I thinking  began creeping into my mind.

Training has stepped up just a bit and is involving more brick workouts each week. Last week was just a hard week for me training wise and so I barely managed to workout 3 days. Which may have played a role in my freaking out a bit on Saturday.

Yesterday we did a brick workout that consisted of 1/4 mile swim and then a 20min run. With the weather so beautiful and summer finally arrived in the NW I decided to swim without a wetsuit. And I am wrote this post so I survived!  The water felt great and the swim came very easily to me.
BUT then today I completed another brick workout. A 4.5 mile ride followed by a 10min run, where we completed almost 1mile. My newly "revamped" Huffy mountain bike did well. Yep, I am riding a mountain bike in my Tri and not just any mountain bike but a Huffy. "Don't you wish your bike was hot like mine?"   I did get it outfitted with street tires and am going to get some cage pedals hopefully this week. (my pedals are too small for cages so we are ordering new ones or Bill said "you will have cages one way or another, that's why God invented power tools")
A quick update on WW as well needs to be addressed - or rather I feel it should. I haven't weighed in since 6/23 when I had lost - .8. But I made Bill take me to face the scale today. And I was up +.6. And you know what I was actually okay with that! Ha! I have been training & eating what I want, whenever I want. And that may or may not have included a few Magnum bars. So I basically have maintained for almost 2months and that was OK with me. My goal of loosing 50lbs before the Tri wont be met but that's okay, because my body is more in shape & 31 lbs down is fine with me.

Yesterday, while waiting on my bike to get fitted I walked around downtown Snohomish and saw a cute sign that I loved and am going to post in my house......

 It took more than

a day to put it on,

it will take more than

a day to take it off.