I’ve gotten fat.

There’s really no sense in trying to sweeten it – I’ve probably put on 30 pounds since my birthday last year.  The last 10 months of my life have been upside down crazy.  I can come up with any number of excuses for being lazy:  Mom got her cancer diagnosis, and I was preoccupied with her care.   I started working mad numbers of hours.  I was depressed about everything.  Those are all true statements.

But it doesn’t change the fact that I just stopped any kind of physical activity altogether and started eating terribly.

But, I’m going to fix it. Going to get back to running. Improve my diet. Starting now.

I do better with motivation, a reason, a sense of purpose, whatever you want to call it.  So this morning, I signed up for my sixth half-marathon – November 5th.  I haven’t run in months, and I know I’m going to have to work extra hard to get back to where I was, but I need to do it.  Because I hate looking at myself in the mirror right now – and that’s a reason to do this.  Plus, it cost me nearly $100 bucks to register.   And that’s big motivation for me –  there’s no way I’ll let $100 go to waste!

Somehow, writing this out validates my need to do this even more, and makes me accountable to those people that read my blog.

Of course, I can’t do anything without rewarding myself.  And running is inextricably linked to music for me.  I cannot run a foot without music in my ears.  So I signed up for a Rock n’ Roll race.  A band at every mile along the course – hello reward!  I’ve done three of them before, and they’re really well organized and a ton of fun.  And when I ran San Antonio, some band along the course was covering Will Hoge.  If that’s not awesome, I don’t know what is!

The half-marathon may only be 13.1 miles, but it’s going to be a long road getting there.  I’ve got a little over 23 weeks – 163 days in total. My journey starts now.

Wish me luck.