I’m on my couch in the apartment that I share with my wife. You read that right. My wife. If you’ve followed anything on this blog pre-pandemic or BLM, you’ll be aware of how strange this sounds coming out of my mouth. In November, I married the magical girl from Alabama that I met in May of 2020 and this image is from our honeymoon in Florida over Thanksgiving.

I am also at the beginning of my 41st year, my 40th birthday was yesterday, and I’m starting to take stock of what the last few years have meant to me. I’ve had a lot of wins and some failures but always with the tendency towards growth, something that again has been a theme in previous writing on this site and something that will continue to be a focus as I start looking ahead at the next chapter looming over the horizon. Today, there were over 500,000 new cases reported in the latest surge of the COVID 19 pandemic, my dad and most likely my step-mother have both tested positive, my brother and young niece have both recovered from the Delta variant and I’m pretty sure I had it over the summer. It seems almost like this post is more like a work of short fiction and belongs somewhere else but…alas, it isn’t. That is also not the focus of the coming year for me.

This year, like the last few, I have set some goals for personal growth and I’d like to put them here for reflection purposes as I’m moving more and more away from social media.

In August, leading up to the wedding, we started working with a personal trainer at a local Crossfit gym, and starting tomorrow we go in for classes rather than personal training. We are starting out with two a week and my goal here is simple. I want to build lean muscle and learn new skills while maintaining a running practice that allows for some ultra-endurance events. By the end of the spring, I’d like to be in a place where I can add a third class through the summer and if all the things fall into place. head into the fall with three classes a week on the regular.
Keep building towards the elusive 100-mile race. I’ve had this goal since 2019 and it hasn’t happened mostly due to COVID shutting down the racing industry for a year and then a failed attempt in October of 2021. I DNF’d the Lake Murray 100 after an epic misjudgment in hydration at mile 34 and avoided a trip to the ER three weeks before my wedding through the intervention of a very helpful medic. If I am going to complete this type of race by the end of 2022, I will need to build strategically and work with quality training and hydration/nutrition. To that end, I have started using LMNT electrolytes for hydration and I’ll continue to use that product for the foreseeable future. I’ll build a race and training schedule as the month progresses.
Play more music. The last 18 months have been a dry spell for my musical aspirations. I have been on the road traveling a lot and things are finally starting to slow down and settle now that the wedding/honeymoon/holiday is done. I also had a near-miss with a box cutter at work that could have made it impossible for me to play the guitar at all, so I think I need to take advantage of that.
Read and write more. I’m back in grad school again, again…and I have a limited amount of time for leisure reading and writing but I need to make it happen. We moved our workouts from the early morning to the evening so hopefully, I’ll be able to utilize the morning pre-work hours for this kind of thing.
Meditation and yoga. Starting this week. Gotta happen.

And that is really it. Nothing major, right?