Monthly Summary – February 2015
Another up and down month.
February started with some rough personal stuff that I’m not going to get into in the blog right now. It’s nothing permanent and we’re getting through it, but it made for a tough couple of weeks. I’m very thankful that I was running and swimming, both of which are good escapes and help me clear my mind.
“Was” running is unfortunately one of the key points of that sentence. I’m beginning to feel a bit like a broken record, but once again, after a few good weeks of running without any pain or issues, things totally fell apart. My knee started bothering me on a Wednesday evening mid-month and by Friday it was pretty swollen and painful to bend. On Monday and Tuesday, I couldn’t bend it and it hurt like hell. I had an ultrasound at the doctor’s which didn’t show any structural damage, but even with some heavy-duty anti-inflammatories, it took a week for the swelling to go down and the pain to go away. I had to take a few days completely off, even from swimming. It’s now been over two weeks and the swelling is completely gone and all my mobility is back but I’ve waited to even try running again. I might try going on a really easy run tomorrow morning. My doctor isn’t 100% sure if it’s just runner’s knee or something more chronic. Runner’s knee would be the easy diagnosis if not for the fact that this is the third month in a row where I run fine for a few weeks, then all hell breaks loose, then the swelling goes away and I repeat the cycle. I’ve been generally careful about not doing too much too soon. I’ve been paying extra attention to easy strength work and stretching so hopefully, with being really careful about starting up running again, it won’t happen again. We’ll see…
I haven’t forgotten about #100FewerThings, but I’m not going to achieve my original goal of getting rid of 100 things by February 28 (today). February got a little out of control and then I was out of town for two weekends and I just didn’t focus enough on it. I have gone through and collected another pile of stuff (this is pile number 3).
As of my last post, I was at a net number of 44. Since then, I’ve only acquired one thing – a pretty sweet Ipsos Girls Lounge trucker hat that I haven’t actually worn yet. And there are 18 things in this photo, so that puts me at 44 + 18 – 1 = 61. I’m still a ways from 100, especially most of the easy stuff is already done, but I’ll get there. March 31?
I spent a weekend in San Diego for Jeff and Rachel’s wedding. Elizabeth wasn’t feeling well and didn’t make the trip, but the rest of my family went, along with many of our oldest family friends in San Diego. This is how we Spector’s do a wedding photo (too bad Charlie’s face is behind the logo!):
For the last few months, I’ve been looking at the below six goals each month and then evaluating how I’ve done. I’m happy to say that I feel like I did pretty well this month. The red is my evaluation of how I feel I did in February:
- Eat better. With the exception of one weekend in San Diego when I ate enough cookies to keep a bakery in business on my own, I nailed this one in February. And most of those cookies were my mom’s homemade deliciousness, so there was really no avoiding it and definitely no regrets.
- Focus on getting better sleep. Except for some rough days at the beginning of the month and that week when my knee was bothering me and actually keeping me up a little at night, I slept well.
- Continue swimming, yoga and strength training on a regular basis. Once again, I had another big month of swimming. I couldn’t continue the trend of swimming more this month than the prior month, but a 28 day month, plus taking a few days off because of my knee made that difficult. With just one more swim, I would have done it. Since the swelling in my knee went down, I’ve been doing regular easy strength training and I did one really mellow yoga class last weekend..
- Run easy. Maybe hit the trails for some easy training. I carried the momentum from January into February and had a couple good weeks of running until my knee swelled up and I had to shut things down. The run with Billy on the Sean O’Brien course was the running highlight of the month for sure.
- Be positive. Eh. I tried, with mixed success.
- Read at least one book, hopefully two. I didn’t read very much this month. I started A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James and really struggled to get into it. It’s not an easy read because of the structure of the book and the various voices he writes in, so there were a bunch of nights when I only read a few pages and then sometimes read those same pages the next night just to try to figure out what the F was going on. I nearly put it down a few times. But somewhere around 150 pages in, it turned a corner and I’ve really gotten into it. I’m now about 300 pages in (halfway), and while I can’t say that I “love” it, I am enjoying it and am glad I didn’t give up on it.
Here’s February by the numbers:
Swim: 40,500 meters
Cycling (outdoors): 0 miles
Run: 40.4 miles
Total Run Elevation Gain: 6,483 feet
Strength Training/Yoga: 6 sessions
Approximate monthly total training time: 25.75 hours
Weight: 163