Permission to Fail: Another walk in the park

I think it's safe to say that almost everyone has heard the preachy old adage, "When you fail to plan, you plan to fail."As a self-proclaimed perennial procrastinator, this Christmas challenge of mine has been a little, well, challenging at times.

Yesterday I counted my walk with Archie as my workout again. While I did spice things up a bit by extending my distance, upping my pace, and visiting the river (gorgeous), my thoughts inevitably centred around the fact that I have not been planning my workouts.

Rather, I have been taking this healthy challenge day by day, cramming my workout into an already busy schedule that is bursting with deadlines about to expire. And you thought Christmas was stressful.

Now I sit, bright and early on Monday morning. It's the dawn of a new week, and I am still without a workout plan. With a busy few days ahead of me, I am taking advantage of a rare moment of downtime -- actually, I'm putting off writing a paper that is due, oh, in three hours -- to think about how to address this procrastination problem of mine. I fully recognize the irony in that sentence.

I will make a plan for the rest of the week today, something I see as valuable to my goal to work out every day until Christmas. Failing to plan has not only caused me to miss one day in the past six of working out, but it's also plunked me right into a routine of going to the gym (and doing the same predictable workout) and walking Archie (which I do anyway -- I love my little man). And in my world, routine eventually equals boring, so plan I must.

I'll post it when the plan is made, but for now, feast your orbs on the photographic evidence of yesterday's walk with Archie.