TotR Social Media Share & July Goals

This week’s Tuesdays on the Run topic is “Social Media Share” and it seems like a perfect time to talk about my July goals, since two of them involve social media. Thanks as always to April, Erika and Patty for hosting!

Before we look ahead to July’s goals and get to the social media sharing, a quick look back at June:

– No snacks after dinner: I rocked this goal! It took a little getting used to at the beginning, but got easier and easier as the month went on. Definitely keeping this habit 🙂

– No iPad/iPhone after 10 pm: I thought I’d failed this one because in my mind I’d set 9 pm as the cut off, not 10. I actually was almost always disconnected by 10, so good for me! I was disconnected by 9 most nights before I got the new phone. When I got a new iPhone, I tended to stay up playing later. Oops! I’m not great at sleeping in, so I need to continue to work on taking little steps to get to bed earlier if I want more sleep.

– Run 10-15 miles a week, with at least one 5 mile run: Yeah, nope. Didn’t happen. Busy month, life got in the way, whatever excuse you want. However, now I’m back on the training plan and in the groove of running regularly so missing this goal didn’t cause much harm (I hope).

For July, I’ve got a couple of fitness goals and a couple of non-running goals. Since this is social media share week, let’s start with the social media-ish goals:

– Next week, I’m going to Italy for a week for a work conference. Work travel is always a challenge in terms of maintaining activity (lots of sitting listening to people talk!) and finding healthy food options (carb heavy continental breakfasts and snacks breaks are far too common). Add in the prospect of Italy, with some deliciously tempting food and it’ll be an interesting week. My goal for the week is to make the best choices I can and indulge in only those things that are truly unique to my location and worth it. To help with that goal, I’m going to photograph everything I eat during my trip and post it on Instagram. Be sure to follow along here (jessanic) for some vicarious Italian food indulgences and to help keep me accountable.

– To balance those food indulgences, I’m planning to be active every day I’m there. It may be too hilly to run much there, but if it is I’ll at least get out to walk or hike each day. This will help counteract all of the sitting in the conference, as well as the occasional Italian indulgence.

– This is a stressful month for us, with a big work deadline just behind me (yesterday – whew) and my trip coming up, along with a trip for Darrell to visit his family for a medical issue. My mom is going to stay with Oliver for a couple of days while we’re both out of town. With Oliver’s illness last week on top of all of this, we feel a little frazzled these days. Thus, I really liked the idea of 100happydays: anything that makes me take that second to pause and recognize the good things helps during crazy times. I’m doing this on Instagram as well (and just realized I was using the wrong hashtag – oops!) and so far, have enjoyed taking the time to notice the silly little things that make me happy, like Oliver’s insistence on wearing his shorts backwards. 🙂 Here’s hoping I can keep it up for 100 days and take active notice of the things that make me happy!

If he dresses himself in the morning, what do I care if the shorts are backwards? It always makes me smile because he feels like such a big boy. 🙂

– As I’ve now officially started training for the Des Moines half marathon and am working on thinking of food as fuel a la the Racing Weight concepts we discussed last month, I’ve decided that this month I’m not going to weigh in. I haven’t gone a month without weighing in since I started losing weight 3 years ago, but if I’m going to shift my focus to food as fuel, I think it’s time for this experiment. I’ve been maintaining my weight without tracking for about 6 weeks now, but I still find myself thinking that it’s okay to have xyz less-than-ideal food because “my weight’s been okay”. If it’s going to be about quality and not weight, I need to take that escape clause out of my mind. I won’t lie – this terrifies me a bit. More than a bit. However, that “fear” might be a good thing to keep me focused on eating good things for the month while I’m establishing these base miles in my training. I’m also aware that traveling to Italy is going to throw off my weight a bit for a while anyway, just from the travel, and I’m worried that I’d see that higher number and start to restrict more than I should for the amount of running I’m going to be doing. My plan is to still check in with my body fat percentage each week, just so I have some kind of check, but hide the scale. Wish me luck!

It can surprisingly hard to make peace with the scale.

– Yoga & strength training twice a week: The fact that I’ve already got this gluteus medius-twinge worries me a bit. I got through all of Lincoln training without this and I’m not sure why it has shown up now. It needs to be nipped in the bud and I know regular yoga and strength training is what I need for that. On the calendar it goes!

My Instagram link is above (and here – jessanic), which will play into my goals this month. Other places I play on the web, primarily for sharing articles that I find interesting are Pinterest (littlemoreeachday – here), Facebook (littlemoreeachday – here) and Twitter (@jessa_snow – here). Instagram is my favorite because I find it the easiest to work with and I like seeing people’s pictures, but I’m looking forward to finding more people to follow along with on other platforms! Be sure to find me so I can find you and check out everyone in the link up for a lot of fun running bloggers to follow.

What’s your favorite social media outlet? I confess I find Twitter a little overwhelming because there is SO MUCH there and I feel like I’m missing things if I can’t see EVERYTHING, but I love Pinterest for recipes and Instagram so that I can vicariously travel/play through other people’s photos. Tonight I’m going to a Facebook “virtual party” for some book thing my sister-in-law asked me to participate in and my very confusion about that whole concept makes me feel very old. 🙂

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