Hello World

This is my first post on this, my brand new blog.

Who am I and what will I be writing about? Well, I’m glad you asked. My name is Sandra, and I am about to turn 29 at the end of next month. With that of course also comes that I will be turning 30 in just a little over a year. Since New Year’s, I have been pondering what I would like to accomplish by the time I turn 30, and the biggest thing is: I want to be fit! Basically, I want to leave my 20s in better shape than I entered them.

Right now, I wouldn’t say I am in terrible shape, especially considering I have had two children (November `11 and August `15) but I have been carrying some extra weight with me for as long as I can remember. When I stepped onto the scales for the first time this year, and it showed triple digits (in kg) it was a bit of a shock. Instead of it sending me to the cupboard to eat some more of the leftover Christmas chocolate to make me feel better, it instead led me to search for a commitment to change my life for the better.

Good thing that I had already signed up to the RunClare series, which is 4 races between January 30th and April 10th with increasing distances of 5k, 5 Mile, 10k and 10 Mile, all taking place in County Clare in the west in Ireland. So I knew right away that I would have no other choice but to run at least twice every week to build up my stamina. Really by now I am looking at the 10 Mile run on April 10th and have a plan to increase the distance of my long run every Sunday, until I am ready to go the whole distance.

I have no illusions that I will win or even rank highly in any of these runs, however my main goal is to continuously run the entire distance this time around. Maybe next year I will be a little more ambitious with my times.

In addition to the run training, I have last week been gifted the programme to the Bikini Body GuideBikini Body Guide (BBG) by Kayla Itsines, and from what I can see on Instagram, that programme seems to have some awesome results. Because of my running training, I will only do her strength and stretching exercises for the moment and take it as far as the 12 weeks bring me. Right now, I have done both the leg and the arm/abs workout of Week 1 (and have the sore muscles to prove it), but I will skip the optional workout, in favour of a rest day tomorrow ahead of my 5k race on Saturday.

To cut to the chase, with this blog I am committing to getting my BMI into the healthy zone (which should mean a loss of about 25kg), to improve my eating and to improve my fitness all latest by the time I turn 30. For accountability, I will share weekly updates on every aspect of my journey.