Nike Women's Half Marathon-San Francisco

My husband and I were just talking and I mentioned that I didn't want to go to sleep yet because I feel like I haven't accomplished anything, so he began to list off things I did do today (really, not a whole lot) but then he said "you signed up for a half marathon! That's a huge milestone!"

And it is.
I forget to give myself credit for a lot of things. I turn things on their heads so quick, I forget to think "yeah, but it's something."

So today, I signed up for a half marathon... while four months ago, I was laying in a hospital bed, trying to stay alive.

October 18th, I will be running in the Nike Women's Half Marathon in San Francisco. It will be my first half marathon EVER as well as the first 'race' I've done in somewhere around three years. I'll probably be running the Color Run in August with my husband, but that's just a 5k.

So here it goes.
I paid $180, I have to do this.

day two: meditation

Day two of Yoga Girl's challenge is meditation. She encourages all participants to do yesterday's theme as well as todays (for all 21 days), so I did a mini-flow before going into meditation. I tend to do a variation of this sun salutation. I don't usually do the lunge, but I do the rest. I actually have an injured nerve in my back which makes it hard to stretch my left leg (I know, sounds weird), so a lot of this I have to just change so that I don't injure myself more. Why do I call it a mini-flow? Because I only do it once, and it takes me about five minutes at the most. I tend to just pick poses I like and work on them after I do a mini-flow, usually headstands, handstands, or poses like crow (one of my absolute favourites!)

Also, a mini lesson for you. I have severe anxiety. I've had it since I can remember, but it was officially diagnosed when I was eleven. It's lead to a number of problems but the biggest is the inability to breathe. That's right, my brain and my body don't know how to breathe correctly. Basically, I'm hyperventilating all the time. I take deep breaths which sound like sighs, and it's almost like I hit a brick wall that won't allow me to get any more oxygen. It's awful, and so doing my mini-flow actually allows me to concentrate on my breathing without it being the main thing I'm concentrating on.

The reason I bring this up is because it makes meditation very difficult for me. With meditation, you are literally concentrating on your breathing the entire time. If I concentrate on my breathing, I become too aware, making it even harder to breathe, but this morning I did it anyway. I think I only made it two or three minutes before I was gasping for air, but I did it. 

In case you were wondering, taking photos of yourself is super difficult, especially as I'm incredibly judgmental of my own photos. Oh, and I had just showered, so my hair looked awful, but whatever. 

I think I'm going to try again tomorrow, but with an actual yoga pose. Maybe lotus, or maybe I'll just lay in child's pose. :)

yoga + me

I've been doing yoga on and off for years. I love it, but it's not something I do every single day. I don't know the names of poses, and I usually don't follow any sort of flow, but it's something I do love.

yogagirl on Instagram posted The Yoga Girl challenge. For 21 days you follow certain themes and post the pictures on Instagram, hopefully keeping up the previous day's theme as well. Ultimately, yogagirl will pick a winner to go to Thailand for a yoga retreat (which is actually on my bucket list). But it's more than just a trip to Thailand. This challenge is to push me towards a better lifestyle, one that I've been wanting and kind of working towards, but not really sticking to. I love yoga, and I want to make it part of my every day life, not just my once in a while life.

I decided to do it, and hopefully I'll be able to stick with it, but I also wanted to write about each day's theme as well, and so I took my old blog and am rebooting it, turning it into a fitness (and other stuff) blog. 

This is my headstand, photo taken by my five year old nephew. It's not the greatest photo, but I'm pretty proud of this particular headstand. I held it for almost two minutes, and was actually completely straight, though from this angle it doesn't look all that straight. The light wasn't all that great, but this is probably my favourite photo that came out of my mini-yoga session.

So I decided to move so that the light from the windows was hitting me rather than behind me... but my dog thought that she should join in. She started licking my face, so this is me falling out of my headstand, since she surprised me just a bit. 

And then the doofus wouldn't leave me alone, and insisted that she needed to do some yoga too.

Because Leelou (my dog) joined, my nephew decided that he needed to join too, which is always fun. He's possibly the cutest little yogi on the planet, so I definitely didn't mind. 

But then came the cat. She promptly fell asleep on my yoga mat, so I just chilled next to the couch while my cuties were being cute. 

At this point my nephew decided he was done being a photographer, so I had to improvise on how to take these. Oh, and Leelou kept bothering me. What you don't see is that she was actually asleep at the end of my mat, but she didn't mind the few times my feet hit her, so I just left her alone. 

Overall, taking pictures of myself doing yoga is hard. I was getting frustrated and I sort of forgot the point of me doing yoga. It doesn't help that I'm sore from my workout last night and I didn't get enough sleep, so I'm grouchy any way, but then I remembered why I was doing this. So I calmed down, and did a mini flow that I love. I set my camera to snap a few pictures every few seconds and came out with these. 

While looking at the photos, I can spot a few things I need to work on in my poses, and I actually find it quite helpful, though I doubt I'll ever attempt to take photos of myself doing yoga again.

Now to decide which photo to use for the actual challenge on Instagram...