• Lists are made.
• Routes are researched.
• Energy is high.
• You feel powerful, focused, and unstoppable.
• Dreams are in abundance.
• Nothing is impossible.

Sometimes we like ‘starting’ so much that we never get going. Day dreaming, musing, and more preparation is done while we we wait for the perfect conditions to start.

We stand at the start line in a cute outfit, complete with matching shoes and headband, waiting for the starting gun to go off.

Newsflash.

No one is going to fire the starting gun. You just have to start.

I don’t know about you, but I also love finishing; especially when I finish well. I image myself coming down the home stretch and I can hear the crowd in the stadium chanting my name…

…Donloree…Donloree…Donloree…

Crossing the finish line of any epic journey is one of the most amazing feelings in the world.

uh-MAY-zing!

Both starting and finishing are an emotional high in so many ways. The start is full of anticipation of fulfillment and the finish has more fulfillment than you anticipated.

Unfortunately, most of life is spent in the ‘Elemenopee Zone‘.

• Elemenopee Zone - (L M N O P zuh-own) The often forgotten, but very crucial letters which make sense of A and Z.

No one stands in a stadium chanting my name after I start my journey. In fact there are so many twist and turns in the process of ‘arriving’ that giving up and going back seems to be the best option.

Then I remember.

The start and the finish don’t mean anything if who I am is not changed, transformed, and grown as I work on moving my start to its finish.

Choose to see what is possible and keep going!

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Who I am matters and is up to me. If spending more time in the ‘elemenopee zone’ makes a more fabulous me, I say bring on the alphabet!

I’ve got a whole life to live and an audacious story to write.

ALL the letters of the alphabet are required.

This month I decided to be ridiculous as I go ‘macro-less’ and wrote the same, old, silly, and boring story that I have lived out time and time again.

Zzzzzzz……

• Peanut butter is purchased while in the midst of a self denial phase.
• Appropriate consumption of peanut butter happens for a week, maybe two.
• Small ‘tastes‘ and ‘eye-balling‘ amounts starts to occur.
• Quality assurance testing of the peanut butter is completed every evening.
• Two epic spoonfuls are consumed and then the urge to eat the whole jar hits.
• Remaining peanut butter is drenched in dish soap and tossed in the garbage.

Its really bad when you annoy yourself.

Today was the last stage of the peanut butter cycle. After I tossed the soapy nut butter into the trash, I spied my brand new iB Active headwear  from i Three Sixty. Seeing how I was feeling a tad bit guilty from my rather large peanut butter ‘quality assurance test‘, I decided there was no time like the present to try my new super cool head phones out.

So sporty!

One evening I was bemoaning the fact people rarely let Canadians participate in the giveaways on blogs and twitter and i Three Sixty saw my tweet. He agreed with my bemoanment (nope, that is not a real word) and out of the blue just offered to send me the fabulous bluetooth headphones; I didn’t even have to submit my email address, make a video, or stand on my head.

Yay for people who like Canadians!

So off I went for a run with an inspirational podcast in my ears.

No cords, but some REALLY bad hair.

Such a great idea!

Running with your headphones flopping around, snaked down your sports bra, or pulled so tight that you can’t fully extend your neck are not fun ways to say buh-bye to the nut butter bloat.

• Headband stayed put
• Ear buds reached both ears comfortably
• Sound was awesome

The only downfall is if you leave your phone behind, the music stops eventually. hah! I have a feeling my husband is going to ‘borrow’ it for his long bike rides.

The bluetooth music headband is the most costly, but there are more options to fit your budget that don’t have bluetooth headphones but still keep you from going crazy from cord flopping while running and listening to a podcast or music.

I vote you try this fabulous product from a company that doesn’t discriminate again Canadians.

Run cordlessly!

Honestly, I don’t really think about it.

I don’t wonder if I am going to or even ask myself if I want to. Even on the days when I think I don’t want to, I will have wanted to finish; so I do it.

I get up, eat breakfast, journal, and drive to the gym on autopilot every day. In fact, it takes work to not get up early and go to the gym. On an average day it is literally harder to not train than to train.

Totally weird, I know.

Then there are some days when working out is a mental game once I get to the gym. In my world, these days can also be referred to as ‘functional training’ days. These are the workouts where you run around the gym like a crazy woman doing 45 seconds of one exercise, then another, and another, and another, and then still yet another.

Continue through exercises until you want to die, rest for 60 seconds, and repeat 5 more times.

• Set one complete.

I don’t like backing down from a challenge, so I do these workouts. I choose a good attitude, plug myself into a good podcast, and get ‘functional’.

After flopping on the floor like a beached whale from burpees and completing 60lb overhead presses, I was slated to jump rope.

The jump rope was dutifully picked up and I got skipping.

Important question.

Why are there so many danged mirrors in the gym?

Everywhere I looked, there I was flopping around like a fish out of water dying a slow, painful, and horrible death. My body was not moving as a cohesive whole.

Nope, not even close.

Jump roping in a mirror is bad for your self esteem. Then when you catch a horrified stare from a thin, lithe woman who has seven percent body fat reflecting in your general direction, you quietly put the jump rope down and take a long drink from your water bottle while contemplating your body fat percentage.

I am allowed to hate this woman, right?

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I was already feeling extra ‘fluffy‘ this week, but the jump rope fiasco confirmed it.

Let’s just say I did cardio after and no jumping of any kind was involved.

Do you avoid your reflection while performing exercises or am I the only one?

If you gave me a choice to run 10 km or train legs, I think I would choose running most days. If you know how much I *love* running, you would know what a mental task it is for me to train legs once a week.

Kicking my week off with legs is the equivalent of a three year old eating her vegetables first.

After Monday it is a glorious week of delts, arms, chest, and back with some abs and cardio thrown in for good measure. Since I would prefer tree trunks instead of pencils for legs, I train like a mad woman on leg day.

I like to know that I creamed my no.2 pencil legs and all the iron being squatted, extended, and lunged is making a difference. I’ve gotta know my legs are growing!

Funny things happen after an epic leg day.

• Water is avoided to the point of dehydration. Sitting down to use the bathroom becomes a task that causes you to yelp out in absolute pain. When you are in a public washroom this can lead to extreme awkwardness.
• Elevators and escalators are used without shame. Walking up or down a flight of stairs requires more strength than you have left in your legs. You and all the grandmas get to catch up on what is going on in the world while your friends take the stairs.
• Standing is preferred at meetings. Your legs are heavy and sitting seems like a good idea until you have to get up. Hoisting yourself out of a boardroom chair while trying to remain professional is a skill all on its own.
• Walking like a drunken sailor without consuming a drop of alcohol. Lurching, stumbling, and tripping are all part of a normal leg day in my world. I nearly took out a man doing box jumps this morning; he was very forgiving when I muttered, ‘Leg day.‘

I am making surrender darn near IMPOSSIBLE!

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At least I know I did a great job ‘eating my veggies‘ this morning!

Time to bring on the arms and delts!

What is your favorite body part to train?

I was the expediter at the Calgary Cup.

An accurate way to describe this job is ‘herding tan, carb depleted cats‘.

My partner in crime backstage. We yell A LOT but always with a smile.

Oh how I love bodybuilding competitions!

Things happen backstage that don’t happen anywhere else and the strangest comments fly around.

In the midst of the gluing, applying of dream tan and muscle sheen, and completing my  217th set of stairs, I heard a few doozies.

• Wow. I love your boobs! You got them upgraded from last year, awesome.
• My suit bottoms are too big. They need to be smaller, much smaller.
• What are the poses for this class? Can someone teach them to me?
• What do you think of my waxing job? I did it myself this time.

There was a couple that competed for the first time and their combined age was over 120 years old.

No matter how old you are, its never too late to start.

Awesome.

What are you passionate about?

This is irony as its finest. 

When I used to get asked this question, I would draw a blank. No thoughts or inklings came to mind. Random things that I thought would sound good to me came out of my mouth.

One time I said, ‘Recycling‘. Ironically enough, at that point in my life I didn’t even recycle. I found myself trying to hold down a conversation I didn’t know a darn thing about.

When we broached the topic of how to compost most effectively, I had to awkwardly escape the conversation.

I am not a proponent of ‘shoulding‘ on myself or others, but sometimes it’s necessary.

You should live a passionate life.

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Sounds great, but how does one do that?

Finding what you’re passionate about is trickier than it sounds. I like a lot of things, but am passionate about very few. I like fitness a lot, heck I write a blog that is centred around fitness and training, but I am not passionate about fitness.

*gasp*

I am passion about helping people see what is possible and empowering them to go get it.

I train to show myself what is possible.

There is a reason, you just have to find it.

• What do you love to do whether paid or not?
• When do you lose track of time?
• What makes you feel weightless?
• When are you unshakable?
• What makes your heart sing?
• What impact do you want to have in the world?

The answers to all of these questions are different, but the essence is the same.

It is time to try new things, quit old things, and get curious about yourself. I give you permission to ‘hate‘ things and ‘be a quitter’. Finish off the things you hate and give yourself room to explore things you love.

It is time to get a better answer than ‘recycling’!

**Caveat – I do in fact recycle now and can talk at length about composting (though I don’t personally partake in such things living in a condo), blue bagging, and the reasons one should recycle.

**No paper was used in the creation of this blog post**

Back me into a corner, tell me I must do something, and there are zero options and I quickly transform from a sweet, quirky, sub-arctic dwelling woman into a pitbull that hasn’t eaten in weeks. You may just lose an arm if you pigeon hole me.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

That being said, if there are too many options I turn into a white fluffy cloud drifting aimlessly through the sky passively waiting for a gust of wind to move me.

More accurately, I LOVE restrained options.

If my life were a high school exam, it would be a multiple choice test with answers ranging from A to E and none of the answers would ever be ‘all of the above’.

Sinc

The Art of Choosing.

I always have a good book on the go. Sometimes they are fun to read books, and other times they are ‘make you even more fabulous‘ books. Reading is helpful for my job. As a Leadership Coach, I am constantly looking for ways to improve myself and resource the most amazing people on the planet, my clients.

Seeing how I love restrained options, I immediately started reading this book when my husband brought it home from the library. I hope he didn’t actually want to read it.

He totally picked it up for me, right? Right.

I am only one chapter deep, but there are already some fabulous gems.

• Choice is the ability to exercise control over ourselves and our environment. In order to choose, we must first perceive that control is possible.
• The ability to choose well is arguably the most powerful tool for controlling our environment.
• The perception of choice is as powerful as an actual choice.
• Small changes in our actions, such as speaking or thinking, can have a big effect on our mental and physical state.
• The min is independent, and indeed so free and wild, that it cannot be restrained even by this prison of the body, wherein it is confined.

Apparently I am a control freak.

Well if that is the case, at least I can choose to control my emotions, mood, words, actions, and reactions.

I LOVE red!

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Control freaks unite for greatness!

I offer you the option of reading this book with me. It could be fun and then we can take over the world, deal?

What is on your bookshelf this month? Why do you read?

• 4:30 am wake up
• Coffee…more than is reasonable
• Kasha
• Arse kicking workout.

After the usualness, I did something unusual.

I spoke at iMedia about blogging, and boy was it fun!

Oh the self portraits! I should have told them to get better at them than I am.

When I wasn’t talking about how much I love blogging, aka YOU, I got to take in the sessions. Thank goodness! The last thing I wanted to do was listen to myself all day when there are fantabulous people to meet, learn from, and tweet with about what we were learning.

Oh how I love Twitter!

I learned about SEO, developing a brand, putting forward a great pitch, and creating a professional image; which is great, but my blog is an oddity. My blog is ME, Donloree Hoffman, and all my craziness online. So while I was learning about how to be a better blogger, I couldn’t help but take away some fabulous life lessons.

Darren Barefoot

• Deeply engage with people and be remarkable.
• Don’t add numbers to everything. Numbers matter, but people matter more.
• Don’t be stupid, think about what you’re saying.

Rebecca Bollwitt

• Pay for the good stuff, the stuff that matters.
• Freelance is not free, everything has a cost!
• Everything takes time, keep going.

In my effort to be a real girl and not bring all my food everywhere, I ate from the buffet line. This may have resulted in scaring a few people, but the deconstructed deli sandwich + epic amounts of spinach salad = a DL approved meal.

Even if the sandwich guts looked suspicious.

Yup, all covered in random 'sauce'. I didn't wipe off the sandwich meat...I just ate it sauce and all. No reason to completely freak out my new friends!

And to top the day off, I won the biggest door prize on the planet.

The thing is HUGE! I think I could fit IN the box once the printer comes out. hah!

I feel a pressing urge to print things….many, many things!

Yesterday was a good reminder to show up, do your best, be yourself, and just be amazing.

Go be amazing today!

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…but you do it anyway, it makes you courageous.

• It makes you extraordinary.
• It makes you fabulous.
• It makes you strong.

Courage is not the absence of fear; it is doing it despite the fear.

Feel the fear and then GO FOR IT!

What eye popping things are you up to?

Macropedia – (mah-crow-pee-dee-uh) A woman who can spout off the proteins, carbs, and fats for all the commonly eaten fruits, vegetables, starches, meat, and dairy items found in her local grocery store before you can say ‘Jenny Craig‘. A high functioning Macropedia does not require the aid of a smart phone app or online food database to accurately estimate the calories in a meal. Macro information flows freely and is often poured over unsuspecting family members in a show of misaligned love.

Did you know you could have eaten a 450 grams of berries, half a cup of greek yogurt, and 6 tbsp of uh-MAY-zing nut butter instead of the cheesecake you consumed in a mere 7 bites?

Yeah, I want to slap her too.

Since 2009 I have weighed, measured, and calculated nearly every single piece of food that has gone into my mouth. There are only a few holes in the DL food journals:

• Post competition week.  I went on vacation with my friends chocolate, red wine, white carbs, and butter. ‘Nuff said.
• 10 year wedding anniversary. We biked 100 kms in a rainstorm around Niagra. I was hungry! I also got rather tipsy after half a glass of wine that night. Funny times!

Other than that, I tracked everything, and I mean everything.

Including pickles.

Even the day I had a huge emotional binge and consumed half a jar of peanut butter. Reporting back to your coach in the weekly summary that you most likely consumed 100 grams of fat in one sitting is a less than proud moment.

Late last week, I found myself questioning my ‘Maccropedian‘ ways.

Food is weighed, measured, obsessed over, daily weigh-ins are done at 4:32 am, and when I look in the mirror I do a very through muffin top assessment.

A girl can’t live like this forever.

Last time I tried the ‘Ok Joe, I am just going to eat like a real girl and all will be well!’ things didn’t go so well. I didn’t stop tracking, I stressed out more (if that is even possible), and I had some epic health things on the go that I was just discovering.

Take two!

I am off to the races! You had better believe I am eating fabulous, healthy food, not keeping track of every single thing, and still working out like a mad woman.

• Food journals have been abandoned
• Freedom from mental food anguish is being learned
• The scale is coming out of the linen closet only once a week
• Muffin top assessments are kept to a dull roar

There is a difference between need and want. It is rather amazing when you ‘can‘ do something how much less appealing it actually is to do.

Buh-bye Macroville. Hello Healthyville!