I fell off the wagon over the holidays.  Part of it was traveling, but another part of it was wrapping up my run training routine that I had been using without a cold, hard plan of what I was going to do next.  Eventually I got going again but even after I started working out again I wasn’t doing any kind of strength training or pushup/situp improvement until the final week of the month.

Lessons learned:

• If I’m on a training plan or cycle, it is critical that I make a concrete decision about what I’m going to do when that cycle ends BEFORE THAT CYCLE ENDS, so that I roll immediately into a new routine and don’t have any window of indecision.  Even if I had simply made the decision to not use a structured training plan and just to go to my standard cardio rotation as soon as I got home from the holidays I would have been exercising regularly for those two weeks and getting fitter while I decided what to do in the longer term.
• Working out routinely, habitually, is critical.  I got home from the holidays on Sunday, 6 Jan.  After that point there were no barriers to working out again except in my head.  The “streak” is hugely important to me psychologically.  The more often I work out and the longer I’ve been working out regularly the easier it is for me to make myself do each individual workout.  As soon as a day passes that I don’t do something physical I fall immediately onto a slippery slope of “well I’m off track now, so I might as well wait until [arbitrary point in the future] and start up again”.  And on a daily basis when I think about exercising, I’m much more likely to say “screw it I’ll start up tomorrow” if I’m not on a streak.
• If I start missing workouts for any reason the key is to start a new streak as soon as possible and to set the bar incredibly low to do so.  I don’t have to start back up where I dropped off or with a grand plan.  That will just give me a barrier and excuse to moving forward.  The key to getting started again is to do anything that makes me sweat and then to do something else the next day, and the next.

Goals for February:

• Conduct the following workouts according to my current rotation:
• Integrate strength training into program again.  This is going to be tricky.  I really want to do this because I was enjoying it so much when I was lifting regularly, but I don’t really want to sacrifice any of the R/B/S workouts I’m doing to fit them in.  I’m going to experiment with a couple options but my goal is to make a decision and start this up again in February.
• MYSTERY FITNESS GOAL TO BE ANNOUNCED AT A LATER DATE.  STAY TUNED, THIS ONE IS REALLY EXCITING, I PROMISE!