Breaking up is hard to do...sometimes.

And sometimes breaking up is really easy. Remember the person you dated in, say, junior high or high school, before you really knew how to start a relationship, or how to end a relationship (or any of the stuff that comes in between that isn't driven by raging hormones)? So you putzed along without really liking that person but were too chicken to actually end it...until you HATED them?

 I've been reading a lot of break-up stories lately. Letters to old friends, stale romantic interests, etc., etc. where at the end of the letter or story the writer reveals to the audience that the dump-ee is actually a previous version of themselves that they no longer identify with, or a pair of skinny jeans, or whatever. Getting rid of stuff (trimming the fat, so to speak) has sort of been a theme in my corner lately so I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon and give it a try. Here goes:

Dear Bathroom Scale, 

Fuck you.

Most Sincerely,

Hannah

Whoa, that was a load off! Definitely very cathartic. Excuse me a moment while I actually go and throw the bathroom scale in the garbage.

 Yeah!! Alright buddies, I no longer have a bathroom scale in my house. It doesn't really matter all that much because I HATE weighing myself; it ALWAYS ruins my day. So I never do it. I keep reading articles though, that claim that people who weigh themselves daily are statistically happier and healthier and richer and have nicer teeth than people who don't (actually I made up some of those descriptors but not the healthier bit) and I end up thinking, "hmm, maybe instead of doing it LESS I should get on the scale every day and just grow a thicker skin" but you know what? For me that isn't going to work. So instead of trying to cram the square scale into my round life, I have elected to stick the square scale into the round garbage pail and that's that. If I need a metric with which to measure progress, I can use a measuring tape instead, which is a way better indicator and has the added bonus of not making me hate myself.

This is fun! I love getting rid of stuff. Where once upon another life I loved to shop and bring stuff home, now I get way more satisfaction from pitching stuff out the door. Sometimes I find it sad -I mean, ten years ago a good retail therapy session used to fix just about anything, and when the fire was cooling in that relationship (can I even call it a relationship if it was inside my head?) I'd go to the mall and wander around and wonder why it wasn't helping. And now? Now going to the mall just ticks me right off if I haven't actually spent time mentally preparing for the onslaught of bullshit that is the inevitable experience of shopping for anything except groceries. But I digress.

Sometimes though, in the pursuit of making life manageable, it's necessary to say goodbye to something that's not so easy to get rid of...and that happened this week too. It was a total bummer and I'm still wrestling with the aftermath of that decision, even though it really was the only logical choice under the circumstances. This week I officially put off testing for my taekwondo black belt and withdrew from classes. I have to keep telling myself that hey, there are only 24 hours in the day and with building a new clientele at a new workplace, finishing existing courses in time to go back to school in January, breathing some life into my music career, and the usual household management-type duties, there just isn't room for anything else. Which doesn't help it suck less, but unfortunately Oprah was right...

So for now my favorite sport has to go, but it'll make me appreciate it more when (not if) I go back.

TOO MUCH

Happy Monday morning my lovelies!

Got a pop quiz for y'all today, are you ready?

Q: How do you know when it's TOO MUCH?

The answer of course is, it depends on the situation, but generally speaking it's when the good feelings start to seep away and the bad feelings start to make their presence known - you know, not all at once or anything, but they just threaten at the sidelines. Ever gone too long without seeing your in-laws? And you know that you're going to have to do it pretty soon but you just can't make your hand grab the phone, even though you know that if you wait long enough for them to call YOU you'll never hear the end of it? And then the more you think about it the guiltier you feel? You've waited too long, 'cause at this point nothing's going to fix it now except squeezing your eyes shut and doing it.

That's too much time that has passed, my friends! And if that's never happened to you because you just can't get enough of your in-laws, well, good for you. But you know what I mean. (I should note here that really I love my in-law's too, but there has to be the right amount of space for the relationship to work.)

So that's kind of an extreme example. Let's bring it closer to home, shall we? Ever make a to-do list? I freakin' LOVE to-do lists, they calm me right down when I start feeling overwhelmed and panicky because I know there's stuff I'm supposed to be doing but I can't remember what it is.

And of course, there's an app for that: my favorite is called Clear and it is ALMOST as awesome as writing down your to-do list on the back of an old envelope...but there's a kind of beautiful tactility about violently scratching out tasks on your to-do lists with a stumpy old pencil. And then, when all you have left is an old envelope with a column of scratched-out stuff, taking that bitch and tearing it to bits and chucking it out feels GREAT. Ain't no app for that!

But today? Today that will not be happening. It didn't yesterday, either. Because, while Sunday is usually my peaceful day to get organized for the week, sometimes life puts a stick in your spokes and all you can do is roll on as best you can. Saturday evening while I was starting the preliminary stages of getting the kids to bed (which in my house invariably sounds like this: "Ok girlies, 5 minutes - finish up and turn the screens off!" "But Moooooooom, I'm in a battle!"), I started seeing squiggly lines around the periphery of my field of vision, which meant that an ocular migraine was coming and anything that I had planned to get done this weekend was going to damn well wait until my eyeballs were ready to work again.

So here we are, it's Monday morning (my absolute favorite time of the week), my head still hurts, and I have this to-do list that has TOO MUCH on it. I know it has TOO MUCH because I'm kind of afraid of it. I can't even start it. I can't even LOOK at it. If I'm not really careful I'll bumble around all day and get nothing done and then tomorrow will be even worse...but never fear - Tomorrow Girl can take care of anything!!

But instead of putting it all on Tomorrow Girl, even though she's pretty awesome, here are my strategies for getting at that TOO LONG to-do list...

1. Add some stuff to the list. I'm serious. First, add some stuff that you've ALREADY DONE. Next, add some stuff that you KNOW you can do, and do on a daily basis. Now go do some of that stuff.

2. Go back to your list and scratch that stuff out! Doesn't that feel great? Get out of bed? Check. Brush teeth? Check. Wake up kids? Feed'em breakfast? Boot their little tushies out the door to school? Check, check, check. Hell yes, you're a machine today! Work out? Check. Take the dog out for a run? Check. (See how the tasks are getting bigger? And you're a third of the way through the list already! Whoop whoop!)

3. Multi-task: my list always has phone calls to make on it...and I hate the phone. HATE IT. I will do just about anything to avoid calling people, because a) I'm actually super shy and b) I hate it when people call me because no matter what else I'm doing, I'm doing something else and don't care to be interrupted, and c) there's like a 1 in 3 chance that once I've dropped what I'm doing, found the ringing phone, and answered it, it'll actually be someone I care to talk to...which means that 2 out of three times it'll be some automated service informing me that I've won a free cruise and all I have to do is cut off my bottom lip and mail it to somewhere and thus claim my prize...anyway. Which is a long way of saying that usually, when the phone rings, I don't even bother searching for it. Where was I? Oh yeah, multitasking! So I make a deal with myself: I'll do something that involves a small time commitment and then I can leave, like a crock pot meal or laundry...THEN I'll tackle the phone calls and emails.

4. Now the big stuff. How many big projects are on your list? If there are more than two, pick two for today and put the rest on Tomorrow Girl's to-do list.

5. Take it easy. Is anyone going to die if you don't get the dishes done or your project doesn't get submitted today? If the answer is yes, better just get it done but if the answer is no, take a breather, pour a cup of coffee, and go outside and enjoy the sunshine for a little while.

Blog post: check.

Defeat and de Feet

Show your feet some love, dudes.

I'm serious. Because when your feet suddenly don't work life becomes a bitch in a lot of surprising ways.

Let me back up a little and tell you the story: just over a week ago my buddy Nancy and I headed down to Red Deer to do the Super Spartan race, a 15k obstacle race (that's 9ish miles to anyone south of the border). We didn't train for it - that would be silly - and since we did it last year we figured we knew what we were getting into. Which was true as far as the course itself was concerned...I knew I was going to be slow, you know, based on the fact that I spent the last year gaining 50lbs and fighting with my health instead of training for an endurance event. What I didn't really consider was that my feet would decide in the first half mile (800m for the Canajuns - see what I did there?) that this whole enterprise was a mistake and that my dogs would bark at me for the rest of the month for my tomfoolery.

So here's how the day went:

Mile 0.5 Realized that blisters were going to be a problem.
Mile 3 Aid Station: asked a medic for some band aids. They replied that they could give me band aids IF I was willing to fill out a form and drop out of the race. Not likely!
Mile 5 Don't think about feet don't think about feet don't think about feet don't think about feet.
Mile 5.5 Noticed blood coming through my shoes.
Mile 6 Blood has lubricated trouble spots nicely! This isn't so bad. What a beautiful day! WHEEEEE this is awesome!

Mile 8 Seeing stars. Starting to not feel very good.
Finish Line: Actually I don't remember much about the finish line except wanting to punch the volunteer who gleefully insisted that burpees don't count unless our chests touch the ground. I think those last 30 burpees took about 15 minutes.
Medical tent: walked in to ask for some band aids. Medic looked at my bleeding shoes and my ashen face and told me to sit down for an assessment. The shoes came off, and the medic actually gagged and called a couple more people over to help.

Fast forward 9 days and I still can't walk normally and I wish I could say I've learned my lesson. Well, maybe I have: gonna actually train for next year. But we got our finisher t-shirts! Fuck yeah!

So let's talk about defeat and perception thereof. I've been mulling this over lots lately given my current situation: started a business which didn't quite go as planned due to health problems and associated self-induced mental fuckwittage, accepted a job which will force me to bust through some boundaries but in the meantime is making me feel kind of...well...very conscious of my shortcomings to put it mildly (which is my issue and no one else's and I fully accept that), and it just generally feels like survival over the past six months has been like pushing an elephant up a ladder. It's getting kinda old.

 Still, (unlike the Spartan sitch) I actually did learn some really good lessons so do I chalk the whole shebang up as a fail? The pessimist in me wants to say yes but I kinda don't want to see it that way. For one thing, if I accept defeat then the door has to close and I will have to find something else to fight for. And while that part would be easy because there are a million things that are worth fighting for, there will always be this hanging what-if thing happening inside my melon. And like I said before, I don't want to - there's still work to do and things seem to be on the upswing. So on that count, lesson learned. Adversity has the potential to make us better if we let it! Gonna sign off now before I get tempted to insert trite quotes from Finding Nemo, even though it applies...

Not gonna say it!

Channelling Chris Pratt

So....it's been a while. I hardly know where to start!

 Oh wait, I know: remember how I had my little panic attack and applied for a job in a studio? And then didn't get hired? And then let the head of the company know what I thought about not getting hired?

Well, they hired me. Of course, it wasn't as easy as all that; in fact if anyone has had a bumpier start with a company I'd like to hear about it! 'Cause I tell ya, the last three weeks have been one hell of a roller coaster ride. Some days I've felt awesome and totally pumped about the future, thinking that maybe I can effect some positive change in the fitness game...and I've felt totally terrible some days, feeling like getting into the health and fitness industry with my history of yo-yo diets, weight struggles, body image and confidence issues and insecurities was a huge mistake. But I've learned something important about myself, which is this: given all those deep-rooted fears and baggage and shit, and the fact that appearance-based discrimination is a very real thing (and don't get me wrong, I know it's everywhere but it really is more pervasive in the fitness industry), I was not ready to start a business. I thought I was, but I wasn't.

So, because I still have to, you know, bring home some bacon (BACON!) I took the position and I can now tell you that Jocks Inc is actually called Body by Bennett and it really isn't a bad place at all - in fact, I am quite liking it there in spite of the lead-up to how I was hired.

But now, the pressure is on: gotta lose the weight and look the part, and I have to go back to school.

This is good and bad. It's GOOD because these are things that I've wanted to do for myself forever, but haven't because....because I haven't. B3 has been great (amazing, really) about offering every type of support to help me get to where I want to be in terms of personal and professional development, and I feel really fortunate that I landed there. It's BAD because I feel like I'm not good enough and now there are all these weird feels bouncing around that weren't there before. Like, why HAVEN'T I done this? Is my comfort zone so firmly entrenched in this "I'm not good enough" state that I fear climbing out of it? I don't know anyone at work well enough to talk about it and see how public a thing all this is, which makes me very self-conscious. I want to wear a Post-It on my forehead that says "I know I know!! I'm working on it!"

So here's how I'm choosing to look at this whole self-development project, which comes courtesy of my husband who knows exactly what to say in situations like this...sometimes. Ha! Sorry Joel, that was mean. Ha ha. In all seriousness he's a pretty wise and awesome person and great to have around when life seems overwhelming, and he said "well, it's time to channel Chris Pratt - and this is your Marvel movie."

Here's what that means: someone asked Chris Pratt what his secret was to getting all jacked and amazing for Guardians of the Galaxy, and he talked for a while about really awesome things to do like changing small things and be consistent with those changes...and then he said that because he had been cast in a Marvel movie it was either get it done or get fired.

Can't argue with that logic! So this is my Marvel movie. Bring it on, then!

Something that's weird about being in new digs with new people though, is that sometimes it feels strange to work out in front of them. Of course it's my issue and I'll get used to it, but some days....Some days you just gotta go do it at home, which is totally okay too. Here's what I did today (from www.chroniclesofstrength.com) - all you need is a medium-ish kettlebell.

 Fresh off the Yacht

• 5 x 1-arm swings 
• 5 x cleans
• 5 x snatches
• 5 x jerks
• 5 x reverse lunges 

Repeat on the other side, then rest for 1-3 minutes and repeat for five rounds. That's how you get your sweat on at home, AND you get some laundry done. BOOM.