Danger Zone...

I received a phone call this morning from a good friend and blog follower. "Are you OK?," he asked. "I'm great!" I replied. He proceeded to tell me that he was worried, because I hadn't written in awhile, and he thought that might mean something was wrong. I paused for a moment and thought to myself, "It has been awhile since I've written!"  I went on to say that everything was going fine, and explained I just had let myself get caught up in life. As I recounted the varying reasons for my week long lapse since I had last posted, it occurred to me that I was in the danger zone.

I had become complacent, and that was leading to a loss of focus. The truth was my friend was right to call and ask the question. My writing has become a barometer for where my life is. I was still on the journey, but I was wandering from the path. I was pushing myself one day .....my most recent milestone, 4.5 miles on the elliptical in an hour (a pretty big accomplishment since I could barely manage to make thirty minutes on the elliptical when I first started this journey), but then taking two days off. I was skipping daily fitness breaks at work when I would get consumed by a project, allowing my puppy to dictate my work-out schedule as I had done with my children in my not so successful days, and I had invited french fries back into my life multiple times in the last few weeks! I would share a great blog moment, but then follow with days of silence.

Clearly it was time to re-energize myself and re-energize this journey. I didn't start this for it to become just another one of my attempts at getting fit; I started this to make it a lifestyle change for my lifetime. In the beginning it was easy to stay motivated because everything was new. I was hitting milestones everyday, and the successes were feeding off of each other, but after almost six months on this quest, my routine has become too routine. I'm at that point on the treadmill where you find yourself checking the time over and over again to see how much longer you have left. You know you have to keep going, but you are trying to find anything to distract you from what you are actually doing.

So what do I do now? How do I shake up this journey, and find the interesting in the ordinary? Or perhaps the point now isn't about finding the interesting in the ordinary, but the resolve to keep going when it isn't interesting any more. Somehow I believe the key to success lies somewhere between the two, finding ways to keep things challenging while at the same time resolving to stay the course when things aren't new and intriguing. So thank you Joel for caring enough to set me back on my path. I guess I really outsmarted myself when I created this village!