Thirty-Nine
It seems strange trying to look back at the last year when there is so much noise clouding the past couple of days/weeks/months.
I am sure this will be shorter than some of the previous years as I feel like I have a little bit of a mental block. In fact, I was thinking about what I was going to write on the morning of what I deemed 6.2 Birthday miles but I didn’t come up with much. That is not to say that nothing has happened over the past year. Last year I wanted to focus on Embracing things more and trying to cut out things that didn’t bring myself or my family joy. Overall, I feel like we kept moving in the right direction. We all continued to focus on things that brought us joy and in some cases started to let go of others.
One last hike in before the storm rolled in and we had to leave Sedona (Airport Loop Trail, May 2019, Sedona, Arizona)
One of the things as a family we did was a last-minute trip to Arizona last May. We were not planning it at the beginning of the year but as my wife and I started to talk about it it just seemed like a great time to go visit family and also be together as a family. The week turned out great as we spent half the time with our Arizona family and then the other half in Sedona exploring all the trails. In fact, what was only going to be a one night stay we extended it to two as everyone was having so much fun.
Running along the Skywalker trail in the early morning hours (May 2019, Skywalker Trail, Sedona, AZ)
I had a couple overseas work trips this past year and on these travels, I tried my hardest to embrace the surroundings and explore more. While traveling to China I made a point to see the Great Wall and I am happy that I braved the adventure as I found myself alone on the wall as I got there so early in the morning (thanks jet lag). Not all of my work trips had such a spectacular sight to see, however, I made the most of almost wherever I went mostly because my early morning or late afternoon runs would lead me to some interesting overlook or park.
Looking towards Tower 23 in the far distance at the Mutianyu Great Wall before the steep climb to come with no one in sight. (May 2019, Mutianyu Great Wall, Beijing China)
Speaking of running, over the past year I continued on with my running and eventually hit a goal that formulated in my mind as the year went on. In October I had hit a mark of running a 5K a day for 365 days. The timing of that seemed to be about perfect as I am looking back at the last 5 months since I don’t think I could have kept it up. However, my running goals have been focused more on distance now and not the consistency of every day running. Some other benefits of my odd running achievement were that I embraced the unknown and talked about my running adventure on a podcast called Off the Couch. It was something new to me and when they reached out I figured why not.
With everything that is going on in the world right now and the focus on physically distancing us and the bans on travel in place as well. I think continuing with the theme of Embracing seems fitting. We are in a very interesting time where my wife and I are both working from home and we have all of the kids with us every day for what might be the end of this school year. In addition, with no after school activities or playdates with friends, this is a great time to be together as a family and do things you always feel you never have time for. My wife and I were just commenting the other day how many weekends or nights do we really have nothing going on. So we are going to embrace this time together as a family and hope we all don’t want to kill each other in the end 😄.