blog to discovery

Every year Cancer Rearch UK organise a series of women only 5km (3 mile) sponsored runs across the UK. Although they are called Race for Life everyone gets a medal as the aim is to finish anyway you can, whether it is running, walking, pushing a pram or wheelchair or doing a three legged race.

I’ve always been a sprinter and thought I’d done my only long distance run when I completed a Race for Life 7 years ago, but signed up for this year after it was suggested it would be a good target to lose some of my pregnancy weight. I was keen to run the race despite having only completed the distance once before, but found it difficult to find time to train and two weeks before the run the furthest I’d gone was 1.6km and that only involved 6 minutes of running.

Okay, I admit it, that title is fabricated a little bit, it should really say I used to be a cyclist.

I used to go on holiday where we cycled to all the locations we stayed and carried all the gear on our bikes. I have cycled around the Eastern and Western Scottish island, Northumberland and Norway. However, when I went to university I virtually stopped cycling and certainly nothing serious.

So why do I mention here?

Yesterday my husband serviced our bikes and we went for a cycle ride. It was really enjoyable cycling on one of the National Cycle Networks through the villages near where we live, particularly as we hadn’t done the route before. It was only meant to be a quick ride so we got some exercise, but somehow, our 20 minute cycle became almost 2 hours! The route took us to almost outside my work before we turned round, which means I now know the safe route to cycle to work and once I can do the ride quicker I can join some of my colleagues who frequently commute to work on their bikes.

I have felt tired and lethargic during the last month and forgot to take action to improve the balance in my life. However I believe my relationships and close family score have increased because I have started making more dates to meet up with friends and family, in fact we had friends round for dinner on Saturday night and took the opportunity to use as much of our wedding china as possible, producing a 4 course dinner. I have decreased the level for money because I have not done any of my usual routine during the last month, such as checking statements. 

What I am most disappointed with is that I have not worked on identifying my goals, let alone taking action to achieve them. In fact, I have been lying to myself that I am working on them when actually I’ve just been faffing and stalling.To make up for this I am going to sit down with some paper this evening and make some good progress at the start of the next 30 days.

I have been procrastinating on writing this post because I haven’t wanted to think about how I would benefit from more exercise. In my post What is happiness? I listed exercise as one component that was suggested in the book Making Happy People: The Nature of Happiness and Its Origins in Childhood. I can fully understand that exercise is a component of happiness because when I’ve been regularly exercising I’ve had more energy and felt more of the opportunities offered by life. However, I am currently in an exercising dip and have been for a few months (OK at least six) and I’m struggling to get out of it.

The second component of happiness I’m going to consider is attractiveness. I know there is little I can do about my features (without taking drastic action) but I know I can do more with what I’ve got. It may just be women, but when you have the perfect outfit for an occasion you know you look good so it adds to your happiness. The biggest experience I’ve had of this was my wedding day, I would have been happy however I looked, but having the whole outfit certainly helped. Unfortunately I don’t look as good as I did on my wedding day every day, but it highlight the reasons why not:

• I was wearing a designer dress
• I spent months finding the dress
• some else put my hair up
• some else did my makeup

I’ve chosen to consider how sleep affects my happiness first because I think it has the most obvious effect. You know when you’re tired everything will be just that little bit harder, things will irritate a little bit more and its more difficult to remain calm, positive and, well, happy.

I’ve never been a good sleeper. In fact, my mother tells me I only slept for 3 hours a day as a baby. Wouldn’t it be great if that was the case now, all that extra time to get things done.

However my problem, now, is not being able to get to sleep; I don’t understand people like the husband who can fall asleep in the middle of a sentence or if he sits still for too long. So it frequently takes me an hour or two to get to sleep and I will then sleep until the alarm goes off when I wake up tired. What I would like, is to fall asleep quicker so I got more sleep and would then hopefully feel less tired, happier and may wake up earlier and have more time in the day.

For many years, whenever I’ve been asked what my goal in life is I’ve said happiness. However, I’ve never really thought through what that means. I think I always thought that happiness was something that happened to you, so one day I would wake up and be happy. Nice idea, but I’ve now learnt it is something you need to work at.

I recently read Making Happy People: The Nature of Happiness and Its Origins in Childhood (read my review) and fairly soon afterwards came across these two posts Happiness formula and What is happiness? which both also consider the components of happiness. As I came across these close together, I took this to be a sign that I should consider my happiness. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m unhappy because I don’t feel that way, but I don’t see any harm in trying to identify ways to make myself happier.

I did a really good job of losing weight and toning up for my wedding. However in the year and a half since I’ve put on over a stone and I hate to admit it, but I now weigh more than my husband.

Before the wedding I was doing at least five exercise classes a week and loving it. Unfortunately due to work commitments and injuries I didn’t get straight back into the routine after the honeymoon. For the last year I’ve half heartedly said I was going to regain the momentum and lose some of the weight, but I guess there just wasn’t the same motivation.

Mark Foster has suggested an approach to losing weight that works like a ratchet e.g. it only goes one way. It is very simple:

• weigh yourself every day
• if your weight is the same as the previous day, do nothing