Day 32 and 33 Recap

One smooth day followed by a tough day that I had to grind out.

Thursday (Day 32) was an all around great day. I had lots of energy, had a number of successful business meetings and completed the latest issue of the Ignite Your Essence newsletter (it was issue number 32 which was kind of interesting since it was day 32 of my challenge!).

It was also basketball night so I had the opportunity to place 2 consecutive hours of uptempo bball. I was pretty much exhausted by the end of the game. I am definitely noticing a difference though. Before I started this challenge, I was exercising an average of 3-4 times per week but doing very little cardio. Now that I have been doing cardio almost every day for the past month, I find I will wake up the morning after basketball and have no soreness in my toes, feet or legs. For the past number of years, I would ALWAYS be extremely sore and beat up the morning after a long bball run.... so I am excited to see how my conditioning is paying off!

Hoops ended around 10:30pm and then it was off to do some late night grocery shopping. The fatigue really kicked in at that point and it was a real struggle just to push the cart around the aisles.

I finally got home and got to work on my newsletter. I spent about 2 hours composing the letter and writing my latest article http://www.igniteyouressence.com/brain.html.

It was 2am and I was exhausted so I went straight to bed afterwards.

The only problem was, for the first time in maybe 2 years, my mind was racing and I was not able to sleep. After maybe 45 minutes I started to drift and then my son woke up crying. This was around 3am. He was sick with some kind of flu which kept him up until about 5am...which means, I was up until that time as well.

So the only sleep I got was from 5am-7am when he woke up and then an extra hour a little later in the morning.

Needless to say I have been feeling pretty tired all day.

Having said that, I was able to spend about 3 hours of solid focus on my work and I ended up accomplishing quite a bit of work all things considered. I was also able to give my wife a hand babysitting our niece off and on throughout the day.

I then mustered up enough energy to get to the gym for my Friday night shoulder workout. Suprisingly, I felt very strong tonight and was able to shoulder press 120 pounds which is really good by my standards.

HOWEVER, I did not do my cardio workout tonight. Normally I would have done a high intensity cardio routine on the 'stepper' but I opted out tonight. Instead I did about 10 minutes of abs and stretching and called it a night. I felt more than happy with my decision as I wanted to give my body a bit of a break.

Then, I came home and had somewhat of an unhealthy night. I did not break the routine on alcohol drinking but I had a big plate of nachos with chicken. The chips were baked as opposed to fried which was a wiser choice...but I washed it down with a pretty good helping of frozed yogurt. Again, this challenge is not about depriving myself, it is about longevity and consistency. I would not want to eat like this every night but it was actually a nice treat to kind of pig out tonight after a hard working and successful week.

The next challenge in discipline will be this weekend as it is Thanksgiving in Cananda. There will be plenty of rich food and drink to tempt me and the gym will be closed for at least one day. I will have to get creative for my workout routine!

See you on Day 34