Thirteen Miles

“I’m baaaack! I’m back in the saddle again. I’m baaaack! I’m back in the saddle again…” (Aerosmith) For the record, I love that song in addition to it being entirely appropriate for the day.

212.4!!! 

Yeah! I am stoked with how things are going (minus this past week). This past week turned into work-chaos. It was a huge branch and at the last minute I was told there would be a person from another team in our company traveling with me. While is nice having company, it also means that the time I would use in the evenings to get work done was spent hanging out with this other person. My days ended up being non-stop work from about 5am until around midnight each night. And I still am not done with everything that goes with my job. Thankfully next week is my at-home admin week so I can catch up!

This morning I finally got back on track with my trainer and we really pushed things. It was awesome! I struggled mightily with a strength and balance move that she had me doing so I just kept at it until I did two “good” ones on each side. She started laughing and said she had never seen anyone so determined to master a move like that. Mostly, after the week I had, I wasn’t going to let a workout move beat me!

I feel like I am on a manic high today. I feel good (albeit really tired, I need more sleep), but I also feel like I am about to crash. No, to my knowledge, I am not manic, but I suspect that this is what it feels like. I think it is just due to the serious sleep deprivation that took place all week and I am sure this weekend I will be working on making some of that up.

At any rate, I am going to be feeling some sore muscles tomorrow. I already feel my neck a little. I think I was straining and compensating on some moves today. I need to pay more attention to that during my work-outs. This weekend I plan to walk the dogs through the neighborhood at a nice clip to get some cardio in and work my shins and ankles some more.

I also need to finally get the Christmas lights off the back side of the house. Thank goodness no one can see them! I am utterly ashamed they are still up, but it has been really rainy here and my yard is a clay-soil swamp which makes using the ladder almost impossible. Cest la vie.

Stress: Work has me over-the-top stressed out. As I stated to Neil, it is bad when I am feeling guilty for not working on a weekend. I have a standard corporate Monday through Friday job. I work well over forty hours in any given week (and that is not even including travel time which according to our corporate policy counts toward our work hours – not that any manager would actually allow us to count it toward that). I am efficient and good at what I do. And there are simply not enough hours in a day to get my work done.

The part that has me so stressed out is that working weekends seems to have become the new norm across the board. It isn’t because of some big special project that is due and then the extra hours will die back. It isn’t because I am a slow worker and am not living up to expectations. There is simply too much work on everyone’s plate. I have managed to avoid it for a while, but this past month has been chaos…and it doesn’t seem to be improving. There are still some good things that might be popping up on the horizon that would mean less travel, so I am trying to keep an eye on that light at the end of this tunnel.

The other huge work stress is my CRCM exam. The Compliance & Risk Manager Certification test is essentially the bar exam for financial regulation. The test is two months away and I am nowhere near ready. We are supposed to be studying for the exam on our own time – but seeing as how we don’t really have any of that these days, I don’t know when I am going to fit it in. In fact, I think this exam is what has me extra stressed out about having to work over my weekends. It all feeds into each other. Thankfully I am good at taking tests, but I am concerned about my knowledge with some…OK many….of the regulations. I am terrible at rote memory stuff which is what I am going to have to do for regs that don’t apply to my line of business. I guess the one thankful thing is that my line of business is a large part of most of the regs these days.

Travel: With all that said, I am doing OK with my traveling workouts. Still trying to figure out how to make them work, but I am getting some exercise in which is better than I was doing before, so I am happy with it. I think, though, that I am going to change my rest day from Tuesday to Thursday. Since I prefer working out in the evening and the hotel gyms seem to be less crowded then, I figure I can get on a bike or a treadmill for a while on Tuesdays. Thursdays I have run into the gym being packed in the morning and then I am working and traveling all day and evening and not getting home until very late. It seems like a better day to just bag it to me. We’ll see how things go this next week.

Resolutions: Later this evening I will do a one-month check-in or recap of my resolutions to see how they are all doing…I’d like to try to stick with them all this year. We’ll see how that goes.

Trainer: My trainer cancelled on me again today for family reasons. I am frustrated and having a hard time deciding what to do about it. We haven’t been able to have a consistent schedule since I started with her mid-December. And while I completely understand family stuff has to come first (major stuff – her mom passed away, her husband’s mom or maybe it is grandma is very very sick, her friend was beaten by her husband and hospitalized, etc.) I have also paid a sizable amount of money to have someone help me get my rear into shape . Two weeks straight of no training sessions doesn’t really fit that model. I would ask about being assigned to a different trainer, but I really like my trainer and when we do meet, we get along well and she is the perfect personality to get me moving without being angry or hating her. *sigh* I give it another few weeks and if we still can’t gain some traction then I will change it up I guess.

OK. I think I have vented my frustrations now…and I do feel a little better getting some of it out. With that, I will go finish my soup and get back to work (typing this constituted my “lunch break”).