Reboot, reset

I dislike leaving this blog neglected for weeks at a time, but it has just been one of those months. One minute I was looking at the calendar thinking, “it’s almost October! My favorite month!” and the next, I’m looking at it thinking, “How can it be almost November?!”

It was a month of meetings and deadlines and fending off unavoidable bugs/viruses (does anyone know how to cover their coughs, anymore?!); of losing sleep and being completely random and undisciplined about diet and exercise. I can’t even count how many days I decided to doze another 30 minutes instead of getting up to exercise… and still had to over-caffeinate to make my one-hour drive to work.

It was also a month in which I turned 55. And not long after my birthday, I took a fitness-age assessment mentioned in the new book, Just Move!: A New Approach to Fitness After 50 (I’ll have more to say about the terrific book shortly) that left me a little shocked and angry with myself – because it assessed me to be nearly 5 years older than I actually am! Granted, I got “dinged” for things like cancer, arthritis and asthma. But I also got dinged for stuff I over which I have more control: weight, resting heartrate, and time spent exercising (I aim for 150 minutes/week, but more often get just over 100).

So, just as I faced turning 50 determined to be in better shape than I’d been at 40, I’m facing the second half of my fifties determined to get back where I was five years ago… to the extent that’s biologically possible! Sometimes I need a special challenge – a race of some kind, for example – to focus me and motivate me, so I’ve picked one. But it’s so ludicrous that I’m not going to tell anyone for a while. For now, I’ll just say that I have the better part of a year to get ready for it, and I’m going to need every week.

(Updated to fix broken fitness age calculator link.)