So. Last week I forced myself to the gym after work. This has been the hardest thing for me to master with moving offices, so much so that I eventually cancelled my membership. Unfortunately for me, I cancelled too late and had to take January as my last month and pay for the month-to-month dues… stupid, but that’s the life of a gym goer. But it’s been way too difficult to arrange driving an extra hour a day (already on top of about 4 hours total of commuting daily) to the gym which should only take about 20 minutes to get to from my office. I know I should. I know it’s important to do. But it’s just not happening right now. Before it was on my way home/to work… now it’s completely out-of-the-way and is making me quite sad, because I really did enjoy it.

Another unfortunate aspect is that it’s JANUARY. Welcome to the month of every resolutioner in all of creation who will eventually drop out after the first two months but are super motivated for a few weeks and spend most of their gym visit taking hours on machines because they’re still not sure how to work them… I can say this because I was, in fact, one of them last year. (Reminder: I was insanely cliché and signed up for my membership at 6:00 pm on December 31st, 2012. Yeah. That was me.) Needless to say, I’ve been trying to avoid the gym like the plague.

Well, in attempt to get back on track and beat out this holiday weight gain, I went. I kept my gym bag sitting out at work as a reminder to myself that I was going to go. I had to go. And if I didn’t, I knew the guilt of not following through would keep me up all night. Well, something else decided to keep me up all night…

It started out like any other normal gym trip: Stop by the ladies room, fill up my water bottle, grab some towels and head downstairs to the cardio floor. I was doing pretty good: good stretching and hydration left me feeling loose and ready, I was going at a decent pace, had my music up as high as it could go without disturbing those around me-when out of the corner of my eye I noticed people running around behind me. I glanced to see panicked faces and people running up and down the stair case, employees bolting down as fast as they could. Naturally I stopped to see what all the fuss was when I noticed the gentleman behind me getting CPR after going into cardiac arrest.

Knowing there was really nothing I could do now that everyone had already jumped to help out (calling 911 was covered, medics called, employees notified and defibrillator gained) I froze. Now, this isn’t the first time this has happened and honestly the first time (only about three years ago) sparked my reboot for wanting to lose weight again. But this time seemed different. We were all in a place where this wasn’t expected, where people were going to get healthy. And I know he was doing well with it, I had seen him before and knew a bit of his story. Maybe that’s what it was too, maybe the fact I at least knew who he was shook me a little bit more.

Eventually they closed down the floor and sent us all upstairs. We all were a bit shaken and you could tell who had been downstairs versus the ones that had already been working hard upstairs: we all had that ashen “what the hell just happened?” face.

It’s insanely sad that these situations are the ones that have to smack sense back into me. I made a doctor’s appointment the next day and check ups for three others. I panicked in my own health status: on my way but still not good enough. Still not at that point where I don’t worry at every turn and question my every move. It’s neurotic, I know, but I want to live a long and healthy life. I want to get married and have children. The children thing didn’t really spark a whole lot of concern until my trainer brought up that those who are overweight have a much harder time conceiving. Crap.

But I don’t want to scare people into thinking that it’s a lost cause; that even by getting healthy you could still find yourself in a situation like this and that exercising doesn’t help. Because that’s not my point. My point is that if anything has kicked me into high-gear it’s this experience. Oh, also and to get re-certified for CPR. Because I felt utterly helpless that I couldn’t help, thank goodness there were folks there that knew CPR and could start before the medics arrived. That’s something my bosses nodded in complete agreement with when I told them about it the next day.

So. I’d like to start sharing with you a few of my favorite healthy habits periodically. I’m hoping through sharing these, I’ll keep myself a bit more accountable and give some of you some new workouts, recipes, etc that you can do to spruce up your life routine! These workouts are also great to use when you’re not able to get to a gym and for days like this when it is just far too cold (and snowy) to do anything outside.

The first is a workout by Tracy Anderson that I found online a few years ago from the Fitlbr community on Tumblr. I can’t remember exactly which blogger I found it from (I think it was from Liz of onetwentyfive or Johanna at myquirkylife), but I found it to be a fantastic five-minute workout for my arms! No weights, just your own resistance! For those of you who aren’t familiar with Tracy Anderson, she is the personal trainer to a lot of celebrities, most notably for Gwyneth Paltrow. She is big with using your own body to get strong and lose weight and working multiple muscle groups at once to give you the best results in a short amount of time.

So enjoy and let me know how you liked it! If if nothing else, check out the two bloggers above! I’ve been following them since my first go at this game! Very big inspirations!

You can follow my fitness journey through my Instagram: heyheyheatherk!

In conjunction with my last blog post, I’d like to get back on board with blogging. I feel like I can zen when I can express my life through this little piece of heaven. And I promise, craftiness will be returning! I have a few things I’d like to accomplish in the near future and with all of these snow days, I might just be able to do so!

So sending many hugs to all of you out there and make sure you pass them on! Because you never know… you just never know.