It’s time to step it up. Fall is hands down my favorite season, and instead of letting it turn into a free for all on terrible foods and no exercise, it’s time to truly celebrate my favorite time of year by getting my health and fitness back under control before it gets away from me again. I’ve worked SO hard to get here.

And so, I’m making changes. I’ve come up with and committed to a training plan for… something big. Something I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about yet. You see, and you DO see if you’ve been reading for a while, I have this habit of launching new schemes in FULL FORCE, starting out with enormous amounts of energy and enthusiasm, and then fizzling and rarely finishing what I started. I’ve thought a lot about why this happens, and while I don’t really know the whole story behind what is probably some deep and involved issue, a lot of it is just the pressure I put on myself.

I open up about these big plans I make. I start out with the best of intentions. And then… well, life happens. I miss a day. I get sick. I miss a week. I have to repeat a day/week/month. As soon as the setbacks (the inevitable, happen-to-us-all setbacks) I started to feel like I’m failing myself and all of you. I’m a perfectionist at heart, and have always had to fight a natural tendency to expect perfection. If I’m not already good at it, I probably won’t even want to try it. Fortunately for the sake of my college degree, that was never particularly true when it came to academics, but it applies everywhere else.

Maybe it’s laziness. Maybe it’s that I don’t want to work hard. I don’t think that’s it though. Mostly, it’s fear. I’m terrified of not being good enough, of failing people and letting them down. I’m scared of being a bad example, a bad influence.

So for now, I think I’m just going to work toward it in little steps. Step 1 is to get back to running. I’m just walking this week, thanks to hernia issues, but I’m going to go back to slow running and intervals. We’ll see where it goes from there. I’m also giving myself the rest of the month off from gluten decisions, especially since I’ll be going to the doctor tomorrow and hopefully getting some guidance from her as well.