A new project

So I totally forgot about this blog until I randomly stumbled upon it yesterday. When I first started it in 2009, it was for a "Personal Change" assignment in grad school, and I didn't really intend on continuing it. Well, when I stumbled upon it yesterday, I realized that if I wanted to blog regularly, the title of "Personal Change" would be perfect for it. I am constantly striving to push myself to be better, mainly by challenging myself physically and mentally in many different aspects of my life. The ultimate goal is always personal change. I hope to chronicle some of those challenges here (and maybe also just ramble about random things sometimes). I can't promise this will be a success, but I will try my best to keep at it. I also learned from my good gym buddy and blogging friend, Athena, from Fitness and Feta that people love pictures in blogs. So, I will also try and get better at photo documentation.

A big challenge that I decided to embark on starting today is to start running a little bit. Now, I love being active in terms of walking and hiking and I love going to the gym and doing things like kickboxing and strength training, but I HATE, DESPISE, LOATHE running. I just find it kind of boring and, yeah, hard and it's just not my cup of tea I guess. However, I am going to be signing up to do a Warrior Dash at the end of the summer which may include some running. It's a 5k but basically in the mud with lots of obstacles. So it's not really a running race by any stretch of the imagination, but I decided I should try and get ready a little bit anyways. Also, I have a dog (whom you'll probably hear about a lot on here) named Lily and taking her with me to run is a great way for BOTH of us to get a good work out and it's a great training/bonding experience. It's nice to not have to go to the gym for myself and then still come home and take her to the park to run around.

I checked out this mapmyrun thingy and figured out that running to the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, running around it, then running home is like 3.1 miles. So, that's what I'm going to work up to. Today, I estimate that I ran approximately 1.25 miles in about 15 minutes. I was going to run a little longer than that but Lily cut us short by stopping to take a poo. Since I then had to stop, get out a bag, pick it up, and bring it to a trash, I figured we would just start the cooldown process. I will probably only run on wednesdays since that's usually my day off from the gym, so it's a good day to just do a little running at home. I may have to figure something else out soon though because it is going to get reeeeeaaaaallll hot and neither Lily nor I will want to run in the sweltering sun. Well, that's it for now. I'll check back in soon with something else CRAZY from my life haha.

Here's Lily and I after our run/walk:

Do you like to run? Do you have any tips on how I should work up to 3 miles? Do you have any tips on running with a dog? Comments please!!!!