January Mission Review

January Mission Summary

The Mission has suffered a major setback. January was not as productive as one would have liked. There were a number of missteps and a lot of bad intel. The original plan was to do Yoga in the mornings and cardio in the evenings. That was a complete failure. However, after regrouping and coming up with a new plan things seem to be progressing.

Mission adjustment 1: morning workout of Yoga was not….working out. After much research it was decided that the problem was a morning workout should be more energetic like cardio. Many people, including The Rock, hit the road (or treadmill) early morning and start the day with a good cardio session. This adjustment has been implemented and seems to be working.

Mission adjustment 2: any evening workouts were being impeded by an unstable schedule between myself and my commanding officer. Her schedule is constantly in flux. Here is an example of my weekly maneuvers:

• Monday - pick up the Recruit at daycare, home by 6pm if no complications. I am home with him until well after 7pm. Dinner is usually not before 6:30pm. By the time the Commander gets home it is time to get the toddler ready for bed. By the time all this is over I am too exhausted to work out. 
• Tuesday and Thursday - after school program keeps me at work until 5:30pm, sometimes 6pm. This puts me home around 7pm most of the time. Eating dinner that late makes a workout difficult. 
• Wednesday - I can go straight home and get dinner at a reasonable hour. This is the only day in the week this happens 
• Friday - Similar to Monday. Commander has work obligations that require me to pick up the Recruit, however this is somewhat sporadic so it is hard to plan around. I also have the Junior Agents to pick up from their barracks. 

Since consistency is key to any program like this I have adjusted the maneuvers schedule to hopefully work around these issues. Any evening workouts will now take place as soon as I get home.

Mission adjustment 3: the implementation of Mission adjustment 2 required that diet be adjusted as well. Before my meals increased in size and substance throughout the day with dinner being the heaviest meal. Based on the advice of a certified personal trainer friend and several articles on the subject I am inverting this plan. I will be adjusting my diet as such: breakfast will be much more substantial to help with morning cravings and sustain until lunch. Lunch was already fairly decent but will be slightly improved. Dinner is where the major change will come. I will be working out BEFORE dinner now and will have a light, protein-based meal. This will accommodate eating later in the evening and will help with recovery from the workout.

The 1st major challenge of the overall Mission will be the 1st week of February. I will be at a work conference all week. I will still be able to get my scheduled workouts in but I will have to be extra diligent with my diet. I will update the Mission log after the trip with its success or failure. Below is a full update on Phase I through January.

Phase I Operations - Quarter 1
Fitness 

• Complete DDP Yoga 
• Various starts and stops. Averaging 2 sessions per week out 5. 
• Complete C25K 
• Just completed week 1, doing well
• Get below 300
• See February Accountability Update for current progress on this goal

Diet 

• Track as much food as possible
• I am exploring myfitnesspal as well. I am about 75-80% compliant with this objective.
• Minimal sugar intake (including carbs)
• This is still going well save for the occasional snack size candy bar. I have had only one full Coke this year.
• No bored/stress/travel snacking
• Other than coffee stops this has gone well. There have been many days I have actively NOT stopped despite being very hungry

Life

• Less frivolous spending
• There has been a few slips on this front but nothing over $5-$10
• Improve time management/make better use of time/stay on task
• I am still struggling with this.
• Do something creative just for me for at least 1 hour a week
• I am not sure if it balanced out to 1 hour per week but I did do some creative things. I wired an f/x Disney Infinity 3.0 Yoda figure to light up off the game base. Continuing with Infinity I spent a few hours playing around in the Toy Box, which it very under rated. It is a fully functional game engine. I am interested in exploring this a bit more.

Stay tuned for more updates. Until then may the Force be with you and may the Power protect you

\m/ THERE IS NO TRY \m/

The Captain: Rebirth Issue 4

Previously in The Captain: Rebirth......I lost weight. Had surgery. Got depressed. Moped around. Got a baby. Moved. Had surgery again.

Issue #4 - 2015: The Most Humbling Year....Not Necessarily in a Good Way

This issue actually opens in November of 2014. I had just had surgery on my right knee for a similar injury as my left knee. This was different though. My left knee was due to heavy lifting and stress during 2 back-to-back moves. This was just me. I had done this. My weight had put too much strain on my knees and caused this damage. This hit me pretty hard. I was in a REALLY bad place. Add that to the usual holiday depression and anxiety it was just a perfect storm of sadness. I went into 2015 feeling worse than I did going into 2013. Little did I know the hits would just keep on coming.

In December my boss had a sit down with me about my job performance. It had slipped due to my depression and people were beginning to notice. I started 2015 knowing things needed to change at work if nothing else. I really did try, but my heart was not in it and I knew it was time to start looking at other options. The baby, now pretty much a toddler, was continuing to be the enemy of everything so I was not getting any workouts in. In my continuing poser theme I bought a new piece of workout equipment that has just sat in my garage ever since. Once again I made all these grand plans that I did not follow through with. Every time I was going to start a workout program (4am is the best time for me to work out which sucks) the baby would not sleep through the night or he would get up stupid early. I would basically tell myself, "well you could not start today so you should just not even bother." I am REALLY good at persuading myself not to work out. It's the great ironies of being fat: A: you eat because you are unhappy that you are fat, which makes you fatter, and 2: you have no energy to work out because you are fat but if you would work out you would not be fat and would have more energy. The universe is really stupid sometimes.

I coasted through the 1st several months of 2015 business as usual. In April things with work really got exciting. Back near the end of 2014 I became a Google for Education Certified Trainer. I was so proud. This was the biggest professional accomplishment I had ever achieved. In February I presented several sessions at the annual educational technology conference in Austin. Things were looking great professionally except at my actual job. My wife and had decided to use our tax refund to pay off my car. I had never done this before and was super excited. I went to the bank and wrote the final check and went back to work. I was asked to come speak with my boss at 2pm that afternoon. It was not a good meeting. Long story short in the course of about 5 hours I went from elated that I paid off my car to crushed because I had lost my job. Not only had I lost my job but I had to run out my contract which still had 2 months on it. That was awful.

This disappointment led into the summer where I still had no job. Most people do not realize jobs are like relationships and job hunting is like dating. You go out looking for jobs (single people) and go on interviews (dates) and hope they like you enough to at least continue to see you for a while. Job hunting is the worst. I hated it. I had so many times I was SURE I had the job only to be fed a line about going another way. I was beginning to question my entire career choice and wondering if I had made a terrible mistake in choosing this profession. I did eventually find a new job, but that did not change the fact that based on my contract with both jobs I was going to be without pay for the North end of 90 days. Let me explain that again: after being laid off and finding a new job I was still going 3 months without pay. The only shining light in all this job business was I got the summer off to spend with my kids.

The summer ended and it was time for me to start my new job. I was NOT looking forward to this job. I felt like I had settled. I did not want to go back in the classroom but I had to have a job. The fall semester of work was unlike anything I had expected. I LOVE my job! Everything was coming together so serendipitously. I really felt like things were looking up. The only downside is I drive an hour to and from work every day which is not very fun. This job also allowed me to get my very 1st professional training gig which was a lot of fun. Things are going really well, despite a few setbacks I can't talk about here, and I am actually enjoying work. For the 1st time in possibly ever I feel like this is where I am supposed to be professionally. This whole experience was very humbling. I had never lost a job before and it truly made me appreciate what I had.

2015 had one more sucker punch in store, but since this post started getting a bit long-winded I decided to break it into 2 posts. Hell if Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games, and Divergent can do it, why not? Peter Jackson can stretch a single book in to 9 hours worth of a movie; I can split a wordy blog post into 2. That being said stay tuned for the final installment -- The Captain: Rebirth Issue #4.5: The Final Insult

\m/ THERE IS NO TRY \m/

The Captain: Rebirth Issue 3

Previously in The Captain: Rebirth....I lost a lost of weight then had knee surgery and spent an entire year feeling sorry for myself. An. Entire. Year.

Issue #3 - 2014: The Captain vs. The Baby

In the later part of 2013 I decided I was going to get back on the horse and try to do an obstacle course race. I even thought if I signed up for one and spent the money I would be motivated to actually go through with it. Guess what? WRONG. I estimate that I have spent about $200 in races I have never actually run. I had these grand ideas of running all these races and did not do a damn thing to make it happen.

In January 2014 I got this wild idea that I was actually going to stop feeling sorry for myself and do what I set out to do in 2012 and run an obstacle course race. As I laid out in a previous post I got REALLY ambitious and signed up for 3 races that year. 1 got canceled, 1 I bailed on, but the 3rd I actually did. Out of shape, in now way prepared for it I ran Survival Race Dallas on April 27, 2014, with a time of {around 1 hour 30 minutes. I can’t find my finisher dog tag with my time on it}. It was really difficult but I was very proud of myself. I met some awesome people that helped me through the course and had a great time.

I had hoped that would have helped me move forward and kick start things but as the song says "life has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you think everything's okay and everything's going right." It turns out my child hated sleep. For those of you unaware, babies and toddlers are the enemies of everything. They are the enemies of sleep. They are the enemies of productivity. They are the enemies of EV. RY. THING. I had a number of false starts on fitness and such because I was always so frakking tired. I even had to convert my desk at work to a standing desk because I kept falling asleep. Seriously, this child never slept. It was awful.

Needless to say I was more worried about getting as much sleep as possible than anything else so I really did not get much else accomplished in my life. The one thing I DID do was persuaded my wife to buy me a Groupon for Title Boxing Club. It was 2 free weeks and a personal training session. After my 1st 2 weeks I signed up for a 3-month membership. I was going Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6am for a one hour boxing/kickboxing class. I LOVED it. I tried boxing many, many, many years ago and fell in love with it. I have tired to keep it as part of my fitness routine ever since. The only issue was the longer I went the less I was able to go because again babies are the enemy. The simple act of going to the gym at 6am 3 days a week was clearly not that simple. Despite my desire to continue going I was missing too many days to justify the cost. Though it was not sustainable it was the best I did all year and actually starting making decent progress. Somewhere in all this I got a Fitbit Zip and started working on tracking my steps. I was really enjoying it and was even doing step goal competitions with my friends. However, having a Fitbit and not actually doing anything kinda makes you a poser.

The summer was more of the same as I had to work for the 1st summer in 7 years (usually had the summer off as a teacher). Summer came to an end and we had to start looking for a new house because our super old landlord was selling our rent house out from under us with almost no notice. Other than the stress of having to move and the WORST time of the year* this move created a new problem. I was lucky enough to have a man cave at our old place and a big field out back to work out. Our new place was going to be quite limited on space. So of course I made the best of it and was that much more dedicated, right? Not so much. Just another excuse.

As we approached the last quarter of 2014 things got SUPER awesome. I was shopping with my family and all of a sudden I was on the floor. My right knee had given out on me and it hurt very much bad. It was a different kind of pain than I had with my left knee back in '012 but it was a much more intense pain. After I fell a few more times over the course of a several weeks my wife and I decided I needed to go to the doctor. I suspected I had psoriatic arthritis as I have suffered from the heartbreak of psoriasis for many years. I went to the doctor and he almost immediately dismissed that theory. He sent me for an MRI and I was referred to another ortho specialist. As the deja vu really set in I was told, almost exactly 2 years after the left knee, I had a torn meniscus in my right knee and would once again need surgery.

Here is the cliffhanger panel of the comic. Stay tuned for the final issue where we find out how I reacted to my surgery and how 2015 went. Spoiler: not well on either front.

\m/ THERE IS NO TRY \m/

*My wife is a band director and we were moving during marching season which is the busiest time of year for her.

The Captain: Rebirth Issue 2

Previously in The Captain: Rebirth....I lost a lot of weight, felt really good about myself, and was preparing to run an obstacle course 5K. Then I had to have knee surgery and it all came crashing down.

Issue #2 - 2013: The Pity Party

2012 ended on a number of sour notes. However during the last week of the year my wife and I found out we were having a baby. We were both very excited. As 2013 began I was firmly rooted in a depression as a result of my knee injury and subsequent surgery. I treated that depression like anyone would: I ate all the things. I was an emotional Baskin Robbins with 31 flavors of feelings. Of course all this accomplished was undoing all the hard work I had done the previous year. I basically coasted through 2013 feeling sorry for myself. The only good thing that came out of it was in my search for post-op workout options I found DDP Yoga. Someone suggested yoga so I started looking around for yoga I could tolerate. I am a huge wrestling fan and enjoyed doing Rushfit with GSP so the idea of something similar from one of my favorite wrestlers was very intriguing. I borrowed the DVDs and did a few of the workouts and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Since then I have had countless false starts at completing the program but I am definitely a fan.

Health and fitness were a major problem in 2013 but professionally things were really improving. I started presenting at professional conferences and making a lot of new connections. This led to me leaving the job I had been with for 7 years for a new opportunity. This was a very exciting development. I started that job in August and was optimistic that I had found a new home. That would not exactly be the case but that is a story for later. This new job introduced me to a whole new area of my profession of which I was previously unaware. I became engrossed in all things Google. I have been a fan of Google products for a long time but I had never looked under the hood. The school district I was with used Google Apps for Education and our director was big on professional development. I did not know I was getting my first taste of what would later be the driving force of my career.

As if the pity party and career change were not enough we had a baby on the way to add to the mix. We spent most of the year planning and preparing for his arrival. Doctor's appointments, rearranging bedrooms, and learning all about things I never really wanted to know about ( I somehow missed all that fun with my first two kids). We anxiously awaited Labor Day, which was both the day my wife went in to labor and the holiday. She did not find this funny. So Blake arrived and the remainder of 2013 is kind of a blur because sleep was not on the agenda.

This update does not have much detail in it because quite frankly I felt so sorry for myself for most of the year and this post reflects how much I did to take care of myself. A year after my surgery and I was no better off than I was a year before the surgery. In the next installment we will explore the age old battle of man vs. baby and sleep continues to be a jerk and elude me.

\m/ THERE IS NO TRY \m/