2019

Time for the annual Year in Review update. This year for me has mainly been focused on working, as I made myself available to work whatever hours I was asked. My employment is casual, so I’m able to work whenever I want really. I decided that as I love my job, I would just see what would happen if I made myself available for any shift at any time, except for when I had appointments etc. It was a kind of experiment to help me decide if I was happy to keep working or if I should retire.

When the year started, retirement wasn’t at all on my radar. Because I enjoyed working and was fit and healthy, I was happy to keep going until the time came that I wasn’t enjoying going to work. So after a year of working long hours, has my opinion on retirement changed? I’m still not sure if I’m ready to retire, but surprisingly I can now feel myself slightly leaning towards it. My retirement birthday is coming up, so I will keep working and keep an open mind about retiring until then. I have a few weeks to decide.

Word of The Year

My word of the year #WOTY for 2019 has been Commitment. At the end of 2018, I felt that my commitment to a few areas of my life was wavering. I was particularly disappointed about what was happening in the area of fitness for me.  I was still involved in the usual fitness activities, but I was starting to feel a bit jaded. In the previous year, I had battled with a few injuries. These injuries were soon overcome, but I think that the constant fight against by body, left me feeling a bit worn out, and not sure of which direction to take.
As the year progressed, I realised that Commitment was the perfect #WOTY for 2019. It slotted into every area of my life, not just fitness related. There were many times during the year, when I wasn’t sure, and I recalled my word of the year. Immediately, it would become clear which direction to follow. So now the year has almost ended, I’m positive that for me 2019 was a definitely a year of Commitment.

Fitness & Health

• My year of fitness in 2019, was focused on maxineschallenge.com. Each program is a 12 week block, and in previous years, I would do one block and then go off and do something else for a while. I would dip in and out of the Maxines Challenge, as I felt like it.  #WOTY Commitment made me wonder what would happen if I didn’t dip in and out, if I stayed the course and participated for an entire year. That is, for three blocks of 12 weeks, with the gaps in between that need to be managed. Now that the year is over, I can only say that it was an amazing experience. There was some weight loss, but that is a side bonus, as weight loss isn’t the goal of Maxines, and wasn’t one of my main goals. I was mainly interested in becoming stronger. As I’m ageing, I’ve noticed that weight training has changed for me. In my younger years, the focus was on lifting the heaviest weight possible. At my age now and taking injury concerns into consideration, I’ve found it necessary to decrease the weights slightly. If this is done correctly, strength shouldn’t decrease, and I know that this is my experience. While the weights did decrease, my strength has increased. This was my main goal for the year, and with Commitment I have achieved it. I followed Maxine’s training plan religiously, while changing up what I needed to change, to suit where my body is at the moment. I knew that towards the end of the year, I may start to feel less committed, so with that in mind, in the last block of 12 weeks, I chose to have a mentor provided by Maxines. This is the best decision I could have made, as I had to be totally committed, knowing that Kathy would be waiting, almost daily, for me to report in. Being able to vent to somebody who wouldn’t judge me, or to pick her brain ocassionally, made all the difference to my experience of the past 12 weeks.
• On the first day of September, as a spring clean out, I decided to give up chocolate for the month of September. By the middle of the month, I was still chocolate free and realised that, for some reason, I wasn’t finding it at all difficult. So I extended the time to finish on Christmas Eve. This felt like a good time. Long enough to be a challenge, but letting me off the hook to indulge over Christmas. For me, a known chocoholic to give up chocolate for any length of time is a miracle. To give up chocolate for 101 days, as it is today is so remarkable as to be unbelievable. I’m feeling very happy with myself that I’ve Committed to and stuck with the challenge. There’s that word again – Commitment
  

  Life 

•  It’s been a difficult year, with a few family issues, that I won’t talk about here, due to the privacy of family members. I’m hoping that 2020 is a better year in that regard. As for my garden, 2019 has almost been a disaster. Not quite, but almost. We finished the summer in drought and even though we had some rainfall during winter, the drought persisted. Here we are at the start of summer now, and the garden is looking very dry and sad, so I know there are challenges ahead. Our dam is almost dry, so I’m watering from the washing machine, which is quite time consuming and means that the water has to be rationed. I thought at the end of last summer, that the garden had almost died, but coming into spring, it bloomed again, and looked great. I think this is a cycle that I will have to get used to here. We use only drought tolerant plants but still they seem to suffer in the height of summer.
• We spent the long weekend in June, as we usually do, in Port Fairy with friends. This is a weekend that we really look forward to every year.
• In November I had a lovely few days in Noosa, visiting my son and is family. My grandchildren, three beautiful little boys, are growing so fast. They have only been there a few months, so this was my first visit to them in their new home. I spent most of the time, while the boys were at school, walking the beaches and trails. It was a very relaxing and reflective time.
  
• A highlight was being appointed on to the Positive Ageing Advisory Council, by the City of Greater Bendigo

Blogging

• Next Phase In fitness and Life: 2019 has been a year of consolidation without any real changes. This year was the 8th year of this blog, with the first three years on the WordPress hosted site. When I look back to those first few years, I do cringe a little, at the simplicity and amateurish look to the posts. But I had no idea at all how to blog. I didn’t even call myself a blogger back then. I was just writing posts with myself in mind, mainly to record my fitness adventures. I had no expectation anybody would read my blog. I was surprised to see today, when looking back, that when I changed to a hosted site, I had 660 followers on the WordPress site. Most of those followers didn’t transfer over to the new site, which makes me feel a bit sad. If I was more on the ball, I would have noticed that before now. I knew there were many followers who didn’t follow me to the new site, but had no idea that the number was so high. I posted 58 times in 2019. This low number of only about one post per week, does disappoint me and I intend to make more regular posts in 2020.

I contributed guest posts to Sizzling Towards 60 & Beyond during the year. I’d love for you to check them out and while you’re there check out Sue’s blog which contains lots of great reading.
You can find my guest posts here:  What brings purpose and meaning to your life After 50 and 5 Women share their secrets to keeping Active Over 50         

• Best Bookish Blog: In January, my new book review blog was launched. I was very excited, as it has been in the back of my mind for a while. Much more exciting, is the way this blog has been received. Immediately, there were really positive comments left. Earlier in the year, a dear reader, who is anonymous to me, nominated Best Bookish Blog for a Bloggers Bash Award. Of course, I didn’t win and I had no expectation of winning. Just to be nominated for this new baby blog was in my mind unbelievable. It made me realise that starting Best Bookish Blog was the right decision, after being hesitant for so long. As usual, April was the month of the A-Z Challenge, and I decided to participate on this new blog with a theme of Book Reviews. I posted a  book review every day in April, which really gave the blog a head start. During the year, there have been 46 book reviews posts and many other bookish posts.
•  Tracking Down the Family: My family history and genealogy blog has been motoring along as usual. I usually only publish one weekly post on this blog. I would like to be more prolific, but time pressures prevent it at this moment in time.Tracking Down The Family celebrated it’s eighth blogiversary in 2019. I have recently started a new series on the blog of Inquests In My Family History.

The best thing about blogging for me in 2019 were the connections made with other bloggers, from all over the world and the amazing blogs that I have read on a huge range of topics. Much of that was done through the Midlife Share the Love linkup organised by Sue and Leanne. I really look forward to Wednesdays mornings when the linkup goes live and I can catch up with what the other bloggers have been up to during the week.  Recently I started linking up Best Bookish Blog to Esme’s Senior Salon and  Eline’s Book Review link up. I’m really enjoying reading book reviews of all styles written by book bloggers.

2020

2020 is shaping up to be a very memorable year for many reasons. But more on that to come soon.

How was 2019 for you? What was your highlight? I love it when you join in the conversation with me, and promise to reply to all comments.

Links to my other blogs:

Best Bookish Blog
Tracking Down The Family

 

© 2019 Copyright. all rights reserved: nextphaseinfitness.com.au