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The past couple weeks have been kind of bleh. I am definitely ready for a vacation day. With me doing the early morning stuff at work, I generally work every day. The last day I had off was March 20th (not counting Sundays). A day off for me is a half day, where I work at 6 or 7 am, then go to class at 10:30-11:20, and then I go home. It works for me because I like and need to work, and, as I was realizing the other day, there are two kinds of time off. Days off and vacations. A lot of people seem to think that a day off during the week is a relief. It is, but not because you get a day to just loaf around. Days off, at least for me, are days to take care of important things pertinent to life, such as laundry, cleaning, registering your car, seeing the doctor/dentist, and so on. Having that time during the week is vital, so if I have at least one half day, I am good.
The other kind of day off is what I call a vacation day. It is a day of no obligation where the sole purpose is to unwind, de-stress, and reboot. When I can, my vacation days include a trip to Provo to see my brother, or going to my grandma's in Murray. With school and work, I have not had a vacation day in months. With steam outage week coming up, where we will not be able to cook for the week of May 6th, I hope to have a vacation day among the days of cleaning and organizing we will have where I can release four months of built up stress. I am not a highly stressed out person, but it all adds up over time and pushing that pressure relief valve is vital to not burning out and losing focus.
Outside of the work world, things are going well. I am learning a lot about myself through running. It takes immense amounts of will power and dedication to run. For me, the first mile and a half are the hardest. Even with stretching and a warm-up, I feel the strain on my legs and feet as I run that first ten minutes and my body naturally would prefer to not willfully experience discomfort. Almost daily, during that beginning mile, I have to focus all of my strength on pushing forward and not stopping. It would be so simple to stop, turn around, and go home; to free myself from deliberate strain, yet each day, I press on and each day, I push myself further. One thing I have realized is that my potential is far greater than I believed. I have been running for just over a month now, getting about three runs in a week. In that time, I have increased my distance by several miles, decreased my time significantly, and today, I tackled and achieved my end of May goal of running from my house to the top of the massive uphill in a subdivision on the mountain (the locals call the spot Make Out Point). The 2.5 miles from my house to the bottom of the major hill is all moderately uphill, then, the road up to make out is straight up, as steep an angle as you can have for about a mile. Already, I am planning to run the hill a second time, this time taking the much harder approach from the north, which has a 1.5 mile climb that takes you almost as high as the massive hill before the road turns down for a quarter mile and takes you to the bottom of the massive hill. Doing that run will certainly take me a few weeks to work up to as it is a solid 2.5 miles of very difficult climbing.
Anyway, as I was saying, I have learned a lot about myself from running and as I see how much I am capable of beyond my expectation in running, I am motivated to push myself even further in other aspects of life, which, if you remember, is the whole purpose behind all I am doing this year, to challenge myself everywhere I can with the goal to learn and grow. Thus far, I feel good about where I am and where I am going.
The other kind of day off is what I call a vacation day. It is a day of no obligation where the sole purpose is to unwind, de-stress, and reboot. When I can, my vacation days include a trip to Provo to see my brother, or going to my grandma's in Murray. With school and work, I have not had a vacation day in months. With steam outage week coming up, where we will not be able to cook for the week of May 6th, I hope to have a vacation day among the days of cleaning and organizing we will have where I can release four months of built up stress. I am not a highly stressed out person, but it all adds up over time and pushing that pressure relief valve is vital to not burning out and losing focus.
Outside of the work world, things are going well. I am learning a lot about myself through running. It takes immense amounts of will power and dedication to run. For me, the first mile and a half are the hardest. Even with stretching and a warm-up, I feel the strain on my legs and feet as I run that first ten minutes and my body naturally would prefer to not willfully experience discomfort. Almost daily, during that beginning mile, I have to focus all of my strength on pushing forward and not stopping. It would be so simple to stop, turn around, and go home; to free myself from deliberate strain, yet each day, I press on and each day, I push myself further. One thing I have realized is that my potential is far greater than I believed. I have been running for just over a month now, getting about three runs in a week. In that time, I have increased my distance by several miles, decreased my time significantly, and today, I tackled and achieved my end of May goal of running from my house to the top of the massive uphill in a subdivision on the mountain (the locals call the spot Make Out Point). The 2.5 miles from my house to the bottom of the major hill is all moderately uphill, then, the road up to make out is straight up, as steep an angle as you can have for about a mile. Already, I am planning to run the hill a second time, this time taking the much harder approach from the north, which has a 1.5 mile climb that takes you almost as high as the massive hill before the road turns down for a quarter mile and takes you to the bottom of the massive hill. Doing that run will certainly take me a few weeks to work up to as it is a solid 2.5 miles of very difficult climbing.
Anyway, as I was saying, I have learned a lot about myself from running and as I see how much I am capable of beyond my expectation in running, I am motivated to push myself even further in other aspects of life, which, if you remember, is the whole purpose behind all I am doing this year, to challenge myself everywhere I can with the goal to learn and grow. Thus far, I feel good about where I am and where I am going.
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