I had a million reasons not to exercise tonight…or at least a few: I spent about an hour and a half raking leaves yesterday (Bill did the lion’s share of the work, but I did quite a bit too), and my entire rib cage is stiff as a result; the stand for my new TV arrived today, and I wanted to set both up (Bill ended up doing that for me); I’m in the middle of redoing my online portfolio so that I can apply for jobs, and I really want to get that finished; I got way too little sleep last night, even by Sunday night standards (I always stay up too late on Sunday night), and by the end of the workday, I was really dragging; and it’s our sixth anniversary today, and though we had our celebratory dinner (all-you-can-eat sushi at our favorite place) on Saturday night, we still have some champagne (okay, prosecco) to drink.

So it would have been awfully easy to talk myself out of exercising tonight. But I didn’t. I got home and fed the cats and then got on the treadmill, and I got through day 1 of week 2. It was a little harder than I expected—maybe it’s because I was tired and still stiff from raking, or maybe it was that I did increase my speed a little bit, but the 90-second jogging intervals seemed a lot longer than the 60-second ones. By about the halfway point, though, I started to feel really good, so maybe day 2 will be easier. I’m vaguely nervous about whether I’ll be ready to move on to week 3 next week, and whether I’ll ever make it all the way through, but I’m trying to focus on just the next workout. And I’m looking forward to it.

And I promise to blog about other stuff shortly, or at least I promise not to turn this into strictly a fitness journal. I don’t really expect anyone to read these posts, and I hope the subject lines will serve as a sort of warning that there are boring workout notes ahead. But posting about each workout is part of keeping myself accountable; it’s harder to back out of something when you’ve made a fuss about it publicly. I have enough self-doubt to suspect that I may still find a way to back out, but every little bit of accountability helps, I think.