20 Weeks

life

It’s been a long time since a ‘regular’ update but life has continued pretty much unabated. I’m fully in the home straight when it comes to my parental leave and have only got two weeks left. Let’s go with one of those big ‘state-of-the-union’ style updates where I keep a track on my big ticket items…

Goals

I didn’t want to waste my parental leave - to look back and think ‘where did the time go?’

Key things that I wanted to achieve included:

  1. Lose weight
  2. Keep writing
  3. Achieve ‘things’

Let’s take each of them in turn:

Lose weight

I was coming off of the back of 6 months of pretty unhealthy living. No exercise and lots of late night snacking and beer. I’d gone from a fairly muscular 68kg to a much less muscular 72kg.

I managed to do a big bunch of weight loss early on with a diverticulitis-enforced diet, but have made much more progress on the ‘muscular’ thing with gym attendance. I was trying to go every other day and have managed 35 different gym sessions since I started on leave for an average of around twice a week.

Not bad, overall. Every half-term/term I stop going as I don’t really find the time. I’ve been ill or away. But aside from those big things, I’ve pretty much kept up every other day. I switched my lifting pattern from 3x5 to 4x8 so my numbers aren’t necessarily comparable but before my third child I was doing (at most):

Deadlift: 3x5 of 82.5kg Squat: 3x5 of 72.5kg Bench Press: 3x5 of 55kg

After 6 months of inactivity I dropped down to:

Deadlift: 3x5 of 60kg Squat: 3x5 of 60kg Bench Press: 3x5 of 40kg

Right now I’m running the following:

Deadlift: 4x8 of 77.5kg Squat: 4x8 of 65kg Bench Press: 4x8 of 47.5kg

Looking at that, it feels like my deadlift’s in the best place it’s been since I was much younger, my squat could probably get pushed up a little higher and my bench press should do the same.

More importantly (though looking at the numbers is pretty cool), I feel pretty good. My workouts are good, the right length, keep me interested and I feel good afterwards. Going to 4x8 appears to have boosted my muscle growth - I feel a lot bigger/more muscular now.

On the eating side of things, I’ve had good swathes of eating healthier. For me, that usually means eating the same things as I would have done, but without evening snacks, beer, and hoovering up the children’s leftover food. Right now (with the world cup on) I’m not doing such a good job on the diet side of things, and my holiday was a major eating/drinking event…but generally, I’m pretty happy with this.

My vitamin ‘habit’ has dropped off pretty precipitously. I saw a study had come out saying that Omega-3 supplements showed no measurable positive outcome in a long-term study, and it’s so hot and sunny that surely I’m getting the requisite vitamin D? I don’t know…really I just lost interest.

Let’s see if I can keep the exercise up through the rest of the year, and knock the drinking on the head after the world cup.

Keep Writing

I don’t need my only avenue of writing to be this blog (I love writing and would love to dedicate more time to novels) but I’m mainly going to focus on my writing here. I started off at a furious pace, writing a blog post every day

  • I knew this was never going to last and set myself a quiet goal of 1 post a week. This is my 56th post of parental leave so I’m averaging nearly 3 posts per week. Go me!

There was a big gap and things fell apart somewhat when I went on holiday. I don’t mind that at all, though. Life is for living, and if a metric encourages bad behaviour, it’s a bad metric. Knowledge is setting a SMART goal. Wisdom is knowing when to ignore it.

I’ve not been able to do much writing that wasn’t part of the blog because I can’t dedicate long periods of time to writing really, and a lot of my head space is being taken up with DPhil things. It turns out, getting a PhD actually takes a bunch of work. Who knew?

Achieve Things

I didn’t specify the things because I guess I didn’t really know what they should be. I’ve been working through a ‘snagging list’ for the last week or two that includes random odd jobs (go to the tip, make a will, repot house plants, paint outside furniture etc.) and progress has been pretty good. We’ve also managed a big house job, multiple holidays, and plenty of familial visits and activities.

The things I thought we might do before I started parental leave (mainly making a tree house) haven’t been done…but I’m not too sad about that. Honestly, when I go through all these blog posts I realise I’ve done so much…it’s hard to be mad about any kind of lack of achievement.

I really wish I’d been able to get an academic paper published…and I’m close. But it’s something that just doesn’t work on any kind of normal timeline. All in all, not bad.

Conclusion

I had big goals. I’ve largely achieved big goals. Not going to give myself 100% on anything, but I’m certainly getting a 2:1 in any kind of reasonable assessment. Two more weeks of blazing heat and then it’ll be back to work.

Bring it on!