Hey friends.

So here’s what’s been up lately,

The last time I wrote a blog post, I was also sitting at the dining room table.

First, I’ve been taking a hiatus from electronic devices (other than my phone) for the past several weeks. It has been lovely. It has also resulted in my blogging less.

Second, my house is really effin’ clean. Thank you, Pinterest/being broke and having no money to go out.

The past few weeks I’ve been getting my big toe wet with swimming again. I went back to the pool for the first time in months … maybe even a year … two weeks ago.

Now, swimming was my first sport. It was my first sport in the sense that I loved to spend time at the pool as a kid. I was on the swim team in my junior and senior years of high school. In high school and for part of college, I was a lifeguard. Until I started running at the age of 25, it was the only kind of “going and doing a workout” I really knew.

I haven’t trained in a competitive way in swimming in 9 or 10 years or so, and despite that I thought that I would just get in the pool and feel as good about swimming as I do about running.

I didn’t. But in the four times I’ve gone in the past two weeks, I can tell I’ve gotten plenty better.

Since I started swimming, and maintaining my weight-lifting program,  I haven’t had the chance to run as often or as far. I felt guilty about that, until I realized that I’m spending almost as much time in spandex as I did during the heavier training parts of the year, so … it’s not like I’m losing fitness. You can’t add things in without taking other things away.

I also have been losing weight without counting calories. It is going soooo much easier. I’m down to 153 from 157 when I stopped in the second week of November. I remember the last time I lost the weight, it wasn’t when I focused on cutting calories but eating wholesome food. And now that I’m doing that again, it’s so much easier. I don’t know why, it just is.

When I finish What makes us Fat I’ll have to blog about that book.  In some ways that book speaks loads to my own personal experience. In other ways … well, I’ll wait until I finish it.

My next goal race is … tomorrow! I’m running the Jingle Bell 5K for the second year in a row. I am hoping for a 5K PR, which would mean beating my time from the last leg of Reach the Beach in September (7:56 pace). I know I can beat my time from last year (8:37 pace) .

I realized at the Women’s Half that I have run more half-marathons (7) than 5Ks (officially, 4). Actually, wow, I realize as I write that that I have run as many marathons as I have 5ks. That’s too funny. It was always like “I have to run the next distance” and then it was “I don’t want short races to distract me from my distance goals” and now I’m like … heeeey, maybe I should focus on trying to get faster?

We’ll see. 🙂