Thank You For Your Support

I finally finished my challenge to myself.  Luckily, I didn’t die.  But I am not going to lie, I pushed myself to my limits.  I believe that is a good thing.  So, let’s start from the beginning.

Here were the goals I set for myself to accomplish from February 1, 2019, through April 15, 2019:

• Run 3 times a week and train for the San Diego half marathon
• Get down to 160 lbs
• Spend dedicated time with my daughters at least once per week
• Stop drinking wine until the end of tax season
• Be present for my wife during Valentine’s Day
• Cook for my family once a week
• Start a blog and get a 1,000 Subscribers
• Run the half marathon

What was the point of me doing this? 

I really wanted to push myself to do better during a particularly stressful time period in my life.  I also wanted to practice being a better man during tax season so that it is easier to be a better man when I am not in tax season………………Let me repeat that……..I wanted to be an even better man when I am not stressed.

Think about the most stressful or challenging times in your life. 

How did you handle it?  Did you persevere?  Did you make it through?  I know that one of the toughest times in my life was Nuclear Engineering School.  Any time I am going through something tough, I ask myself if it is harder than that.  If it is not, then I know I will be able to do it.

Tax season is the most challenging time for me as far as business.  However, in the past, this has spilled over into my family life too.  I wanted to push myself a little harder this year so that from now on, I won’t be as stressed about tax season.  Because at the very least, I will not be taking on as many projects at the same time.

You have got to test yourself from time to time to see what your upper limits are.  And sometimes, you must retest again.  You have to break habits and level up every once in a while, to see what beauty lies over the mountain.  So, I decided to push myself to the next level. Not only be a better man but a better person.

Let’s see how I did. 

Working Out 3 Times Per Week

As far as working out three times a week, I was doing great.  I was getting out and exercising three times a week.  You know how you are so motivated when you start a challenge?  Well, that was me.  I was all in and ready to go.  I was on track to finish out through the half marathon.  Then there was a hiccup at work that caused business to be a bit more stressful than usual.  The stress literally caused me to have a stiff neck.

On March 22^nd, I woke up with my shoulder hurting.  Then it spread to my neck.  That Saturday I went to the movies with my wife because she wanted to see the movie Us.  I watched the movie and after that, I laid in bed the rest of the weekend.  I was in so much pain, I think I slept all day.

I knew what I needed to do to fix the problem.  I went to my chiropractor first thing on Monday morning.  I scheduled 2 to 3 massages, and I kept up with my own personal self-care to get me back on track.  Because of this, I failed at running 3 times a week consistently.  That being said, I succeeded in running the half marathon and giving my body what it needed to get back to where it belongs.  I listened to my body and made sure that I took care of it so that I could get myself back to where I needed to be in order to be able to run.  Some people would have given up after that.  I did not run for 17 days. At this point, I was 2 weeks out from my half marathon.  I didn’t get to train the way I wanted to, but I trained enough prior to make sure that I was prepared anyway.

Weight-Loss

I am happy to say; I did succeed in getting down to 160 lbs.  I wasn’t really worried about this.  Even after I hurt my neck, I knew that losing weight is about 80% diet and 20% working out.  I am of the belief that I don’t need to work out to lose weight.  I believe people are working too hard.  I personally, like to try to find the easiest path to success in everything that I do and working out excessively is not my idea of fun.

I do like to get out and run for about 30 to 40 minutes 3 times a week.  Overall, my body feels a lot better when I do.  However, the point of me working out is mainly to feel good and not necessarily to lose weight.  When I start working out at Orangetheory that will be more for toning and sexiness.   I accomplished the weight loss by signing up with Splendid Spoon and having my breakfast and lunch delivered to me.

If you don’t know, I am a plant-based guy, so I knew if I followed this track, and avoided consuming too much bread, I would be fine.  I still ate vegan ice cream.  I also made Bananas Foster one night, so dessert was covered.  I had bread from time to time, but I mainly consumed smoothies and soup for both breakfast and lunch.  The soups were so good that I looked forward to eating them.

The other reason I signed up for a meal delivery service was so that I didn’t have to think about what I was eating.  What I was going to eat from one day to the next was one thing I didn’t need to be worrying about.  Having this service allowed me to get into a routine that benefited every part of my life.  I was eating healthy therefore, I was feeling better which enabled me the time I needed to concentrate on other things. I was also able to pay more attention to work and family.

How much would you pay for that? 

Daddy-Daughter Time

I failed but really only by one day.  It wasn’t my fault at all.  I promise you this.

Here is the story. 

I woke up one school morning and I started going through my routine like normal.  My wife comes into the house and says, “Where are my keys?”  I think to myself, of course, she lost her keys again.  I swear, she loses everything.  I said, ‘no problem, I will just give you my set of keys for your car and you can be on your way.’

Now………Where are my keys?  Meanwhile, my wife finds her keys and she is out the door.

OK… I think I left my keys right here…….

We have all been there.  The kids have to leave for school at 7:20 am. It is now 7:00 am and I have 20 minutes to get everyone out the door so I can get the kids to school at 8:00 am and I can’t find my keys.

During all of this, my children are jumping on my bed.  The very place where my keys may be. We can’t be late, and I still can’t find my keys. I call an Uber and take the Uber to drop my kids off at school.  $40 later, I get back to the house and come to the conclusion that I have two options:

1. Tear the house up to find my keys
2. Clean the house to find my keys

Since I have a family, I chose the latter and started with my bedroom and worked my way throughout the house.  20,000 steps later, I cannot find my keys.  The day is wasted.  It is tax season and I’m a Certified Financial Planner. I don’t have time for this and now it is 4:00 pm in the evening.

Other than a few e-mails answered, the day is gone.  I start calling around to get pricing on new keys and am told it is going to cost me anywhere between $500 and $1,000 to get new keys.  The problem wasn’t the $1,000.  I have that.  The problem was, I know the damn keys are in the house.

I drove my car home.  They are in the HOUSE!   I am going to spend this money and then one day my child is going to come down and look at me and say, do you need THESE keys?  I didn’t want this to happen, but I’ve exhausted every option and I have cleaned the entire house.  I even found pee pee diapers under the couch.  After the realization of just how disgusting my kids can be, I was dumbfounded as to where my keys were.

By the time my girls got home, I was tired and in a bad mood.  At this point, I am trying to keep it together, but I’m starting to lose the ability to keep cool.  I didn’t let it affect my daughters though since they’re now running around without a care in the world and playing hide and go seek.  My oldest daughter decides to hide in her sister’s closet.  Next thing I hear……DADDY!  My wife starts screaming too.  They come running into our room with my keys in hand.

Where were they you may ask? 

In the closet, in a basket where the linens are.  It seems that my 3-year-old thought it would be a good idea to put my keys there.  Of course, when I asked her that morning about my keys, I got the I don’t know what keys are look.  Earlier that morning my wife yelled at me for not putting the tile mate on my keys so that I can find them.  Cheap Armond was not going to get trapped into having to buy this $20.00 tile subscription every year.  Not anymore. The tile went on my keys right after that.  $1,000 vs. $20 per year and the ability to find my keys with ease….Priceless.

At any rate, this was the day I was going to pick up my kids from school and hang out with them.  It didn’t happen because I was stranded and cheap Armond was not taking an Uber to pick up my children.  They lost my keys anyway; they can stay there!

Did I stop drinking alcohol? 

I did that like a champ.  I didn’t miss it all.  Hell, I can just not drink ever again.  Nah, I am messing with you. I can’t wait to drink again. Also, if I ever get the bright idea to stop drinking during tax season, please somebody slap me.  There were some major events during tax season like I don’t know, my birthday!  I couldn’t even drink on my BIRTHDAY!

Who came up with this stupid idea?   

This was horrible planning on my part.  But at the end of the day, I stayed true.  I honestly love the fact that I was able to quit.  I lost a lot of weight and I felt great.  Plus, I wanted to start doing it every year to disrupt my drinking.  We are just going to have to do some proper planning for it.  Let’s face it, alcohol is not good for you at all.  It was awesome to give my body a bit of a break.  I also like proving to myself, that it doesn’t have control of me, nor does it make me who I am.

My wife said that I am no fun when I don’t drink, but who cares what she thinks.  I loved it!  Again, it was another way to prove to myself that I have control over my life.  I choose to be happy.  I choose to not do without anything that I want to do.  If for whatever reason, someone tells me that I can no longer look down this happiness in a bottle (there is happiness in every wine bottle), then there are so many more avenues that I can take to make me happy.  When we are dealing with health issues, people are told that they can no longer do something, or they have to change their lifestyle…………. Make the change.

Valentine’s Day with My Wife

I failed at being all the way present…. But again, I am going to blame someone else.  It isn’t my fault, I swear!  Ok. Here is the story.

We didn’t go out for Valentine’s day because we decided to do a cooking class together.  We went on a Friday night.  I was hard at work up until it was time to leave.  I was working from home and I was trying to get all my notes in before I left for the cooking class.  I heard the babysitter come in our home and finally, my wife comes into the office to tell me we’ve got to go.

I run upstairs, change into my sexy clothes and we rush out the door.  We get to the cooking class on time and everything is great.  Ready to learn how to make some risotto.  Our friends get there, and it is turning into a superb evening.  My wife, all of a sudden leans over to me and says, by the way, I forgot to tell you, but we couldn’t turn the water off on the bathtub so it is just running.

Huh?!  So, it is just running water in the tub.  We are not talking drizzle.  A drizzle would have been fine.  No, we are talking fill the bathtub up with water running.  The kind of running you do when you want to get the water hot.  If the look on my face was on a movie screen, the screen would have turned red and sirens would have been going off.  I called the baby sitter to see if she could turn the water off.  Nope.  I would have told her to turn the water off to the entire house, but I have never had to do that before so I couldn’t tell her where to even start.

Part of me wants to run out of the cooking class and go home to fix the water.  I look at my guy friend and he just smiles at me.  I think to myself; I could ruin everyone’s evening by running out of here.  The running water is going to cost me about $200.  The cooking class for me and my wife was around $180.

I calmed myself down and stayed in the cooking class as I mentally listened to the water running in my tub back at the house.  We had ourselves a good time and as soon as I got home, I ran to figure out how to turn the water off.  When someone asks my wife why she didn’t tell me the water was running before we left, she says she forgot.  We both looked at my wife and said, that is something that you don’t forget.  But nonetheless, I feel I should give myself half credit on this goal because of the situation.

Cooking Once a Week for My Family

I did cook for my family once a week.  I did a fabulous job planning ahead and cooking some pretty good food.  Since I was adventurous with some of the meals, some of them didn’t turn out to be great.  There was one night my daughter put my dinner in her mouth and started to scrape it off her tongue with her hands.  It wasn’t a high point in my culinary experience.  On the real, I kept making things a bit too spicy for my children, but I found some food that I would definitely make again.

My favorites were:

• Dirty Rice with Smoky Baked Tofu – Mississippi Vegan
• Green Curry Lentils – https://groundleaf.co/green-curry-lentils/
• Black Beans over Coconut rice – Easy Vegan Book
• Mushroom Carnitas – http://bit.ly/mushroomcarnitastacos

All-in-all, it worked great.  I found some new meals that I can cook for my family.  Some of the other meals I made I would make again.  I would make a little less spicy the second time around.  Now, I know what some of you are thinking – IT WAS ONE NIGHT ARMOND!? How could you screw that up? I would say to you true, but I was trying to be adventurous and try new things.

There were some things that I could have done that would have been a lot quicker and easier. Trader Joe’s is right down the street.  I would have just meal planned it a bit differently to handle more nights.  I also would have thought of some meals that I could easily throw together.  The meals I cooked took a little bit more prepping, but I could have done even more.

I could have simplified some meals so that I would have done less during the weekend to prep during the week.  I had to spend some weekend time prepping all the vegetables for my weekly meals, so they were cut up and ready to go.

Here is the thing about my life, my marriage, and our shared kitchen. I do not have control over the kitchen.  This is my wife’s territory and she really doesn’t want me over-staying my welcome.  Let’s just say, she likes her cooking better than mine.  But she welcomes the break at the same time.

Getting to 1,000 Subscribers

Subscribers, subscribers, and more subscribers.  So, this didn’t happen.  I was able to get more Instagram followers than I could have imagined, but the focus here was on email subscribers.  While I received some positive feedback from the blog, I failed at getting my subscriber numbers up.  As much work as I put into this blog, I needed more time to figure out how to gain a greater following and found I didn’t have enough time to do everything.

I ended with 275 subscribers and close to 2300 Instagram followers.  I wasn’t really shooting for the Instagram followers so that was positive.  When you are dealing with goals that require other people to participate you have to be a bit more patient and not give up so quickly.  Sometimes, people are not going to like what you have to say.

Remember; you don’t need everyone to like you in order to get where you want to go in this world.  You could do fine with just 10%.  It’s about figuring out the right balance and a solution to offer others that will grow a following. I learned through this experience, that there is a lot of fun in figuring out the math.

Run the San Diego Beach & Bay half marathon

I rocked the half marathon, crossing the finish at 08:35, overall course time was 2:01:20 and my pace was at 09:16 min/mi. I drank beet juice before the race, met with my crew, ran my heart out and stocked up on fruits for post-marathon recovery. I got to say I am damn proud of myself on this one. I trained hard, even when I ran across some roadblocks. I didn’t give up and just kept pushing. This was the final goal I had set for myself and it felt like a huge accomplishment.

Overall Outcome

Overall, I think it was a success.  Some things went as planned and other things did not.  That is life.  The whole point of a goal is to give yourself something to shoot for.  Even if you miss, you are still better off than if you had never made any goals.  Plus, it gives you something to keep striving for.  I found that along the way you’ll also learn a little be more about yourself.

Here’s what I gained and learned from setting and striving for specific goals over the past 2 months:

• I run faster than I have ever run before.
• I found out that I am self-disciplined enough to not drink alcohol.
• I grew in emotional intelligence by not leaving the cooking class.
• I learned the difference between $20.00/year and a $500 – $1000 for key replacement.
• I learned to give my body love when it needs it
• I showed myself that if I feed myself the right kind of food, I can mentally and physically perform better than ever.
• I learned more about my girls and what makes them tick
• I figured out that with proper planning, you can stay on top of everything. You just have to pause and plan.
• With the blog, I have explored my true thoughts about money and why I feel the way that I do.
• I also learned that I can’t control everything and sometimes it’s necessary to go with the flow. Again, emotional intelligence.

Financially, since money wasn’t a concern, it really gave me the space to do all the things that I wanted to do.

Once again, I want to thank all of you who supported me through my madness.  I am not finished.  Because for those who know me, once you complete a goal, you must form some new ones.  So, I will be doing that soon too.