Patience, perseverence, and persistence

For some odd reason patience seems to be one of the rarer virtues around. This manifested itself in e.g. the overt greed of Wall Street and the City, and how sustainability and persistence were forgotten. It's especially sad to see, amongst others, longstanding and very traditional institutions be the victims of very short-term greed.

On a slightly separate note, I recently signed up for the Stockholm Half Marathon. It is held on Saturday, September 12th and I thought that it would be a great way to rectify the injustice of me not getting to participate in HCR'09 this earlier in the spring due to health issues. Also, I recently noticed that due to some slipping in lifestyle-related things I had started to amass some weight. Instead of going on a diet as such, I just decided that I would kick up my training a notch and then adjust my eating habits to contain a larger proportion of vegetables, fruits, and the like. Another policy decision concerned fast food and soft drinks: they're gone and replaced with more frequent home cooking and mineral water.

Related to this, I never really understood the point of any type of strict, project-oriented dieting, which seems to be all the craze with women. It's not only one or two women who I know who seem to be doing this; deciding to drop weight over a certain period of time and then they go back to their old routines. But if the old routines were the ones that brought the extra weight in the first place, how does this work? I think that it's the longer term policy decisions with which you hopefully more permanently alter you lifestyle that get the job done.

I also broke out my heart rate monitor from the closet again to complement my running. It seems that I may have finally matured enough to actually be able to do slower runs at lower heart rate levels, which are quite possibly the things that were missing from my previous training. It again requires a healthy bit of patience and restraint to keep yourself from just blasting away on your jogs in the same way that you've been used to before. But again, hopefully this type of strategy will pay off in Stockholm and if things go well, then maybe even on a marathon next summer. All in all I feel that this recent change of trying to integrate sports and exercising as a more integral part of my life may be for the best. We'll see...