Weekly Workout

I didn't hit the treadmill this week, but I did get some good building time in- more on that tomorrow.

Since I don't have any treadmill time or races to talk about this week, I thought I'd talk about my 40 by 40 plan. I'm only a month out from the official start date, so it'll be here before I know it.

The original plan was to incorporate as many different types and distances of races as possible in the two years before I turn 40.

Until a week ago, I would have said that even one race a month was going to be difficult, given Mr M's work schedule and having to find childcare for a newborn.

That changed this past week.

Mr M broke his left big toe a month or so ago at the beginning of his pre-deployment training and his follow-up appointment last Monday showed that he's been repeatedly re-breaking it since then. There's all sorts of bone fragments in the joint and he's going to need surgery to clean everything up enough for it to heal properly. So he was sent home for the surgery (which will have at least a month or two of recovery time) and told he wasn't going on the deployment since he wouldn't be able to go with them. They didn't want him to join them later when he was healed, which is weird when you consider the lengths they went to make sure he was going before all this, but we're not complaining.

It's turned out to be one of those blessing-in-disguise things. We were stressing about him being gone when the baby's born, and all the questions surrounding childcare and who would go to the hospital with me. It would also be a lot of stress on me to handle all the newborn stuff (late night feedings, out-of-whack sleep schedules, etc) by myself while also caring for Sunshine and River. And honestly, we didn't really want him gone for a year, again. This would have been the fourth time, so we're kind of done with it.

There is a down side to it though- we have to ramp up our job search again. We were still looking, but not with the same sense of urgency since we thought we had time. We've got a small amount of time while Mr M has surgery, but we do need to find something soon.

Mr M got home Thursday night (everything moved very quickly once they decided he needed surgery and wasn't going with them) and we've been re-evaluating and changing plans since then.

It'll still be a challenge to train for and run two races a month with a newborn, but at least Mr M will be around to watch the kiddos. And money will remain tight for a while to come as we work on paying off the debt that has accumulated since Mr M got laid off last fall, so there won't be lots of available cash for entry fees.

While I had wanted to do a variety of races, I think I'll focus on 5k's for the first year. Hopefully the second year I will be able to incorporate more variety since the baby will no longer be so young and hopefully our financial situation will have improved.

I'm getting better at it, but I'll continue to focus on going with the flow and accepting my limitations (time, physical, etc). I'll make changes as needed, whether to my training or racing schedule, and keep moving forward.