A brand new year....

that will lead to a brand new me! My new year's resolution is to really dedicate myself to my running and stick with it. I want to be that girl running races and most importanly I want to be skinny Julie again. So I will be running Monday through Friday and concentrating for a while on running 3 miles a day. At this point I can run 2 straight through but I hit a mental block at 2 miles that tells me to stop and I have a panic attack and can't go past 2 miles. I have run 3 miles once, no walking at all, but it was the slowest pace known to man but I never walked. So today since I hadn't been on the treadmill in about 6 weeks I started off running 1 full mile which is easy for me and I'm starting off slow because I know tomorrow my legs may be achy and my mind will say "let's skip it today" but my mouth and my legs will say shut up and I'll get on the treadmill and run 1 mile again and a little more each day til I'm running 2 miles straight again and then just keep building that way til I'm at 3. My friend wrote a blog post that said "You've got to slow down if you want to win" and I'm using that motto to slow down back to 1 mile and build back up to my 2 and then on to 3 by increasing my speed. I was running 2 miles but not at a very fast pace. So this way I'll slowly increase my speed and mileage at the same time, all the while watching the pounds fall off. And I'm drinking protein shakes to help muscle recovery too so I'm not too sore and will be able to run daily. I have devoted the last 11.5 years to being a stay at home first and never do anything for myself and this is the year I do something for me!