Committed

I've gone and committed myself to the Janathon 2014 and one of the requirements is that you workout every day and then try and blog about it (or you can tweet).......yep, almost messed that one up on day 1, not the exercise part, that was done and dusted hours ago but this writing every day? Well, there may be lots of picture posts this month without any words to go with them ;-).  One good thing about it is that it will get me more active about commenting on other blogs again, I've gotten very lackadaisical about that over the past couple of years.

2014 has kicked off quite well though. My partner and I opted for a night in because the mutts are terrified of fireworks and thought it would be easier on them if we were here--yes, that's the age old trick of blaming it on the dogs, lol.  A minute or two before midnight I headed out the door with a suitcase to walk around--a delightfully quirky practice that a friend talked me into doing for the first time last year.  Apparently it means you will travel a lot in the coming year and it certainly worked for 2013.  I might not have traveled to many new to me places but I got to go with someone to whom they were new so that's as good if not better.  Although based on how long it took for my belongings to arrive from the US I might should have put some clothes in the empty suitcase I wheeled about just in case that is what jinxed me.

While doing the stroll down the street the fireworks started in earnest, I already knew that British people were quite passionate about their pyrotechnics but nothing quite prepared me for New Year's Eve in England.  There were explosions of color everywhere in every direction for miles......even when you couldn't see the actual firework burst on the other sides of the hills surrounding us you could see the white glow against the clouds and after a few minutes the "smog" from the gunpowder. It might not have been London but we didn't have to deal with the crowds either.  I was absolutely enthralled, Ben and Elsie quite a bit less so.

Oh, back to the workout part.  Elsie the Miniature Schnauzer Menace and I ran 4.62 miles in 45:12 this morning, not bad considering the not quite gale force winds and the two hills we had to huff and puff up. After a small breakfast and a fair bit of wasting time on facebook I finally did my Truckin' Runner challenge of 90 bicycle crunches then a core workout I borrowed from Pinterest which involved even more bicycle crunches.  It was the v-ups that kicked my arse this morning though, couldn't get through the set of 30 and 20 without breaking them up into smaller sets of 5 and there might have been some girl pushups mixed in as well.

Love this reminder