FLABULOUS

Fitness Milestones

It’s hard to measure success of any health journey. Sure there’s the scales, but sometimes scales lie. They don’t take into account the actual weight of the food or water you have in your system at the time, they don’t take into account sodium bloating (not to mention *ahem* cycle bloating and they sure don’t account for muscle gain and as we all know muscle weighs more than fat.

So how do you gauge success? Well one way I’ve found it through fitness milestones. If you’ve noticed a difference in your fitness level, how far you can walk, you are starting to jog, you can do twice as many crunches or push ups, you walk up the stairs or tie your shoe with ease, if you’ve noticed a difference in any of these things you’ve probably hit a fitness milestone. It’s just another way to be proud of yourself without being tied to the scale.

Yesterday, my friends, KJ and I made what is, in my opinion, a definite fitness mile stone. For the past 2 months we’ve been getting together every single Saturday morning without fail, walking, training for a 5k event that’s coming up. On our very first time out we’d planned to go 1 mile. Neither of us had really worked out in a while, but when the 1 mile mark came around we were feeling good enough that we actually went 2.5 miles which was a surprise in itself. Since then we’ve been slowly upping the mileage to prepare for that 3.2 mile milestone.

Last week we walked almost 4 miles and couldn’t believe it. It’s only been 2 months, and we’re only meeting once a week (though doing our own workouts during the week) so it was a surprise that our abilities had increased so much. But today, OH today! Yesterday KJ and I walked 5 miles, half of which was with her little one uphill, and it felt GREAT. We couldn’t believe how far we’ve come and we have definitely hit a fitness milestone. In fact, we felt so great we’ve decided to go for a half marathon at the same event next year, something we’d never even want to dream about doing in the past! Talk about success.

My hat is off to KJ for pushing me, what would I do without her?

Oh, and the best part is that we celebrated afterwards by going shoe shopping . . . man are my calves starting to look good.