Category: Physical

The Road Less Traveled

Pinpoint a moment in your past where you had to make a big decision. Write about that other alternate life that could have unfolded.

I have been having trouble figuring out what to write about. I found a site that lists out a bunch of topics for posts. As soon as I saw this one I knew it was the one I needed to write about. I may not follow it exactly but it will give me a good start.

Pinpoint a moment in your past where you had to make a big decision. Write about that other alternate life that could have unfolded.

One of the hardest decisions I ever made in my life was when I decided to leave the Navel Academy Prep School. I loved the military side of things but I wasn’t mature enough at that point in my life to make the grades that I needed. The worst part about it was that about half of the school was failing. I was doing fairly well in most of my classes except for one. The teacher was failing everybody. I learned later that at the end of the trimester the teacher ended up curving the entire course almost 40 points. When I found that out it really pissed me off. One of the things I had wanted to do since I was a little kid was fly planes and I let something like that teacher get in the way of that dream.

I have had 2 extremely difficult phone calls to my parents in my life. The first one was calling them sitting in my Explorer Sport, at the pier on the Newport, Rhode Island Navel Base staring at the bridge home (header picture, sorry it’s so grainy). The second one was trying to tell my mom that Isabel was having to be life-flighted to Denver because they were not sure if she would make it if she stayed in Gunnison.

Getting Back into Shape

During the summers Jen and I play town league softball. It is a lot of fun but it takes me about half the season to get back into any kind of shape. It is tough when you get a hit that should have been a double but you are breathing too hard once you round first to even think about going for second. When I played college football I was in the best shape of my life. It was easy then. Not showing up for a workout wasn’t an option. I am not in horrible shape right now and Jen does an great job of making sure there isn’t a bunch of junk food in the house and always making well balanced dinners. The main problem I have is that it is way to easy to listen to the 10 different excuses for not exercising and just sit down, drink my coffee and head to work in the morning.

I enjoy exercising and miss doing it. I remember how much more energy it would give me for the day and how much I enjoyed using the time to think about different things going on in my life. Now every time I try to start a new workout I feel like I end up setting the bar too high. I tend to overdo it the first day and then never get back out after that.

This time is going to be different. I have announced to everybody on here that I am going to do it and that should keep me pretty motivated. Also, I am going to start off very simple and easy so I don’t hurt myself. This way I will not be killing myself and I should be able to keep increasing my workout each week. I think tomorrow I will do a short walk/run and will plan on doing the same thing Wednesday and Friday too. I will let you know how it goes tomorrow.

Post a Day in May

Last month I read about a few people doing a post a day challenge and decided that would be a great way for me to get used to writing again. I decided that May is my month to see if I can dedicate myself to posting something each day to the blog.

Last month I read about a few people doing a post a day challenge and decided that would be a great way for me to get used to writing again. I decided that May is my month to see if I can dedicate myself to posting something each day to the blog.

Why Am I Doing This?

I have always wanted to level up my writing skills. I think I do a good job of expressing myself through writing but it takes me a very long time to write and way too much editing. I can write and article now and it will take me 2 or even 3 hours just to get to 200 words. I am hoping this will not only help my personal writing but also help me when it comes to lowing the amount of time it takes to produce content for some of my customers websites.

How I’m Doing It

I have 7 different index cards that I have written the 7 topics I want to write about each week. The seven topics are Career, Financial, Spiritual, Physical, Intellectual, Family and Social. For those of you keeping track those are the 7 topics that Zig Ziglar calls the “Wheel of Life.” In his opinion must be balanced equally in order to be successful in life. I figured it was a good place to start since it touches on every aspect of my life. Some of the topics will be very easy for me to write about. Others will be much more difficult. Keeping that in mind, each week I will have 1 day where I can decide to not write about the topic and just write about whatever might be going on. It will be interesting to find out if the topic changes each week or not.

Rules!

I have a hard time doing this list this without a few guidelines in order to keep myself on track. Below are a few of the rules that I am going to follow for the month.

  1. The posts must be at least 250 words.
  2. I cannot spend more than 45 minutes on the total article. No more than 30 minutes writing. No more than 10 minutes editing. No more than 5 minutes finding an image.
  3. All the posts must be written in MarkDown.

Final Thoughts

I spend too much time editing myself. I am going to write about what I am thinking and help myself work through some things. If I say something that you disagree with please let me know about it in the comments. Everybody has their own opinions and I enjoy hearing different sides to situations. Please keep things civil or I will delete the comments.