A lot can change in a year

 Have you ever heard that saying you have to know where you came from to know where you're going?  My weight loss journey is a lot like that.  With each pound loss or new short term goal reached I keep reminding myself why I started all this in the first place.  The tricky part about success is remembering to stay humble and learn to take the good with the bad.  I often post transformation pictures, not to brag about my progress (OK, well maybe a little bit), but mostly to keep me focused and motivated.  Seeing my hard work pay off month after month helps me visualize the changes yet to come.  Be careful about the praise you receive though, it can be easy to get caught up in all of the hype and get complacent in your diet/exercise.  You can find yourself so overwhelmed by all of the complements that you lose sight of why you started in the first place and continue losing weight or altering your body simply to please others.  Try not to get hooked on that feel good high you have every time someone tells you how good you look now, so sometimes you might need to take a step back and evaluate what you want and what's keeping you going. 

I'm quickly approaching my one year runniversary and I've been doing some reflecting about the past 12 months worth of races.  I'm guilty of getting a bit caught up in all of the weight loss hype and losing sight of why I started all of this.  Today I took a look back at pictures from the last year and could hardly believe it.  Not because of the changes in my body, but because of how much I was able to push myself and conquer each new goal I set for myself.  When all this started last November my goal was simple, do at least one 5k race a month.  That was it.  Of course I made other goals for myself but none of those were fitness related, they were just general goals for my life. I could have never imagined that from that one goal I would become an endurance athlete, start a blog or anything else that's come of this crazy ride.

Now that I've come full circle and will be running the same race I started with a year ago, I couldn't be more proud of what I've accomplished.  In that time I have finished over 30 races including obstacle course races, a half marathon, a triathlon and more than a handful of 5k and 10k runs.  I guess you could say I'm an overachiever.  Somewhere along the way I realized that the harder I worked, the more my body changed and in turn the more I was able to push myself to accomplish.  So while losing weight wasn't the original goal, it became part of the process and I can proudly say I've lost over 40 pounds.

A year later from that first step and I have so many new goals that giving up and going back are not options.  I will continue to challenge myself, because with each new victory I gain the strength to tackle the next obstacle.

From Day 1, to now...what a years worth of racing looks like