Over the 15 years that I've blogged about fitness, I've always struggled to find any sort of consistency in strength training. Running has been and probably always will be my favorite form of exercise.

Strength training has come and gone over the years -- oftentimes it shows up when I'm rehabbing an injury, sticks around for a while and then takes a back seat when I start training for a race. 

But since April 2020, I've discovered a new appreciation for strength training and actually kind of look forward to my weight lifting workouts now. 

It's a weird shift for me, going from running 4-5 times per week with one day of lifting if I was lucky, to running once or twice per week and consistently lifting 3-4 times. 

But I've found that I don't miss running that much. I think that virtual marathon back in the fall really burned me out. While I largely enjoyed training for it as a distraction from the pandemic, I was also very, very glad when it was done.

Having strength training as an alternate form of exercise to focus on has been a really welcome change of pace, and I've been really proud of some of the progress I've made in just a year. When I started lifting weights regularly last April, I had access to 3, 5 and 8 lb dumbbells at home. My husband was able to find a set of adjustable weights that went up to 20 lbs fairly early in the pandemic. I couldn't use those for much more than a few leg exercises at the time.

By June, I found myself desperately searching the Internet for a pair of 10 lb dumbbells. In just two months, the 8s had become too easy for many things. I felt like I struck gold when a Walmart that we happened to be driving past in Fredericksburg, VA said they had two 10 pounders in stock. 

By the fall I was comfortably using 10 pounds for every upper body move except shoulder and tricep stuff and that was mainly because I was dealing with my stupid frozen shoulder. For lower body, I was now using my husband's adjustable dumbbells alternating them between 15 and 20 pounds each depending on what exercise I was doing. 

And by February, I was ready to bump up to 12s for some upper body things and really needed the ability to jump to 25, 30, or more for lower body if I wanted to avoid a plateau. 

So we started shopping around for one of those super expensive sets of adjustable dumbbells. Bowflex was on a 4 month back order so that was a no go. I found a set of NordicTrack ones on Amazon, but they sold out before I convinced myself I really wanted to spend that kind of money.

I fumed to myself for a while about my hesitancy, and as soon as I saw they were back in stock, I pulled the trigger. And since then, I've been able to continue to slowly progress in the amount of heavy stuff I can pick up.

I'm glad I have these kinds of progress markers because from the outside, I don't think I look very different, and I feel like that's the stuff people are alway curious about. 

All this weight lifting has not given me a six pack, but I can tell my core is a ton stronger because I can hold a plank for so much longer. I haven't lost any weight, in fact, I've actually gained some during the pandemic -- probably from all those M&Ms I eat. 

Maybe if I squint at myself in the mirror, I can see a tiny bit more definition in my arms -- you know if the light is right and I stand just the right way. But this is not some remarkable physical transformation story. I don't have any before or after pictures to show you. 

This is just slowly and consistently working to get a little bit stronger. One year in, I can pick up much heavier stuff, many of my muscle imbalances have gone away and sometimes I even find running faster isn't quite as hard as it once was. 

My little baby blog turned 15 years old this month! 15! I cannot believe it. 

This blog has given me so much over the years. It's held me accountable for my fitness goals, which was the reason I started back in April 2006. It's also where I taught myself to code and developed my technical skillset through a lot of trial and error. At one point, it even made me a little bit of money.

Blog design circa 2015.

Perhaps most importantly, it's how I connected with a bunch of other people from all over who were also interested in running and made "Internet friends" that became real life friends that I still have today. 

This corner of the Internet started as a bare bones running training journal using a boring Blogger template. I tried to find a picture of what it used to look like but the WayBack Machine didn't archive my first template. This was the earliest look that I could screeenshot from 2010, with my old original blog name.

My first post was all about my decision to sign up for my first marathon, and every post for those first six months chronicled each run I went on. I wrote in excruciating detail about the summer humidity, about the hills, about tracking my distance. They were often lengthy posts, and there were no pictures. Blogging was definitely about the words back in 2006. 

Over time, my blog morphed. As more people came to blogging, bigger communities were building, real-life friends were developing and I shared a lot more than just running in this space. The early 2010s was definitely when the blogging boom happened. I was writing more than 200 posts in those years, going to meet ups with my "Internet friends," and treating this blog much more like a part-time job with an actual strategy behind it. 

Here's a real throwback from 2011's Healthy Living Summit in Philly.

A few years later, at the same time my life got busier (grad school, more work responsibilities), lots of the blogging community shifted to other platforms like Instagram. With less time on my hands, I found myself with less motivation to write here. There were a few times I thought about just shutting the blog down, but I could never quite bring myself to do it. 

And here we are. 15 years later. I write sporadically now, when I have time, more for myself than for others. In some ways, this blog has come full circle. I started it as a running journal -- something I never really expected anyone else to read. And now it's just a place where I can document fitness goals, great books I've read and our house projects. 

I don't know what the next 15 years will hold for this space. For now this works, and if it starts not working, I'll adjust. 

March was a solid month of reading for me since I got off the library waitlist for some books I had really, really been looking forward to. Colin Jost's memoir was probably my favorite book of the month. It was laugh out loud funny, and I highly recommend it. 

I also read some great mystery/thriller types in March. It's definitely my favorite genre, and I found myself turning to it a lot recently.

Nothing lower than a 3-star rating on Goodreads this month either, which means nothing was a real dud!

Five Stars

A Very Punchable Face by Colin Jost
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love Colin Jost on SNL, and I was really excited to listen to his audio-book. It was laugh-out-loud funny. As in, I was on a walk around the neighborhood and would have to hold back laughter so my neighbors didn't think the pandemic was making me become unhinged. This was one of the best comedian memoirs I've read in a long time.

The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I couldn't put this book down, and every time I thought I had a hunch of who was guilty, the book took another twist and I was left questioning things again. Elin and her boyfriend set off for Le Sommet, a luxury resort set up in the mountains in a place that used to be a Sanatorium. She's there for her brother's engagement party. But after the first night his fiancee goes missing, and dead bodies start showing up. Police can't reach the hotel because of the snow, so Elin must use her police skills to figure out who is behind the murders and stop anyone else from dying. Highly recommend!

Four Stars

Infinite Country by Patricia Engel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is short, but really powerful. It tells the story of a family pulled apart by immigration laws. When a Colombian couple overstays their tourist visa in the U.S. they are forced to move frequently and live in fear as they try to work to send money back to their family. When ICE deports the husband, the family makes the hard choice to separate. This book is movingly told from many different perspectives -- the parents, the children born in the US that have citizenship and the child born in Colombia who doesn't have legal status.

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a fun and fast murder mystery read -- though I will say, like many YA books -- at times it was very unbelievable. If you can set aside the fact that it'd be nearly impossible for a teenager to do or uncover some of the things Pip does and uncovers, this book will be super fun and enjoyable. For her senior class project, Pip sets out to reexamine a five-year old murder case. A girl went missing, her body never found, and everyone in town is convinced the boyfriend did it. The fact that he killed himself a few days after the girl disappeared doesn't help. But Pip doesn't believe it was the boyfriend and she sets out to prove his innocence.

Three Stars

Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was very weird. It sounded super intriguing from the little blurb. It's about a girl who attends a very private, a bit mysterious college set in rural PA. She discovers that things aren't quite what they seem to be and sets about to find out what's going on. I didn't expect the magical/mystical element of this book and I think that's why I felt a bit meh about it.

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It was kind of fascinating to learn about the world that these four South Korean women inhabit -- where beauty is so highly prized that young women undergo round after round of plastic surgery to live up to the beauty standards. This is definitely a story of female friendship, and the way the women look out for one another is touching, but at times, I found the plot line to be a bit slow.

The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After all the hype this book got when it first came out, I was expecting it to be a complete page turner. While it was a good mystery, I found at times the plot line got kind of slow. I also found it to be a tiny bit predictable, which isn't always bad. I like trying to guess the ending in mysteries, but in this book I struggled a bit to keep some of the characters straight, and I think that's why it sort of made it easy to figure out what was going on. If some of the other characters had more to them it might have given me more to be distracted by.

The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was enjoyable, but for a thriller, I found it a little bit predictable. A couple goes to dinner at their neighbor's house, the baby-sitter cancels last minute, and even though the parents run next door to check on the child every 30 minutes and keep the baby monitor with them, the baby is kidnapped. Suspicion centers on the parents, but as lies unravel, more things become unclear, and what started as a straightforward crime becomes anything but. A good fast read, but a tad easy to see some of the twists coming.

The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America by Eric Cervini
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I didn't know many details about the LGBTQ+ experience in the U.S. pre-Stonewall, other than broadly speaking, things weren't good. This book shines a light on the early days of the LGBTQ+ advocacy movement. It focuses on Frank Kameny and his fight against the federal government and the endless court battles. It covers the disagreements between advocacy groups over the "right" way to earn respect for LGBTQ+ people. This book is meticulously researched and really interesting, though at times, I felt parts got slow and a bit too much into the minutia -- hence the three-star rating.

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