30-Day Challenge: Update On Making Exercise a Daily Habit

Well… 25 days into the 30-day challenge and I could tell you that I failed at day 16. I’d been working on a huge pitch and when I was home I just wanted to do nothing, if I didn’t have to work… Just wanted to switch my brain off and decompress. So not exercising became easy (there’s that slippery slope I mentioned in the first post). We delivered the pitch last Friday and I could tell you that by then my body ached from sitting and working for many hours at a time and from being hunched over my laptop. Quite a mess! I felt guilty about failing the challenge at the time but surprisingly not as much as I did this weekend once everything was done.

My thoughts revolved around my Mom and the months after her death in 2004. Sadly, it was only after she died and once we got the autopsy results back that we found out that she had coronary artery disease (CAD) and it was really bad. I don’t even think she knew she had a ticking time bomb in her chest. The night she died, she didn’t feel well and thought it was just indigestion and went to bed early. Because my Dad wanted her to rest, he slept on the sofa in the living room. Both were always early risers and so the next morning when 10 AM rolled around and my Mom still wasn’t up, my Dad went to check on her… Her time of death was said to be around 12:30 AM. There were Tums all over the floor and on the nightstand. It would seem that right to the end, my Mom thought it was just indigestion until it was too late to do anything.

Did you know that Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for Canadian and American women?

On the Canadian Heart And Stroke Foundation website, it lists 9 controllable factors associated to risks and heart disease. My Mom had 6 and only controlled 2.

• She had high blood pressure (took meds)
• She had high cholesterol (took meds)
• She was overweight
• She was physically inactive
• She smoked
• She was really stressed

My Mom also suffered from something that far too many women (Moms) suffer from, something I call “chronic suck-it-up-ism”. When she was sick, nobody knew about it. If she was in pain, nobody knew about it. She never complained, not even to my Dad. She also avoided doctors like the plague. I think she preferred not knowing what was wrong with her. So the night she died, she thought she was under the weather. Heart failure is often confused for indigestion or acid reflux.

A couple of weeks later, my Sister and I went to see our doctors. Heart Disease is hereditary and neither of us wanted to suffer the same fate. When my tests came in, I was nervous as hell. I sat across from my doctor and he read me the results. I bust into tears. Everything was normal or better than average. He said to keep doing what I was doing and I wouldn’t have any problems…

I continued to do my thing and was in the best shape of my life. I was geared up to run the Montreal Marathon in 2005 but then I had another setback: My ex and I broke-up 2 weeks before the race. I found myself moving that weekend instead of running. I’ll spare you the details of the story but after that, I slowly stopped running and before long forgot everything I promised myself I would do but more importantly not do and I got lazy (I have to call it what it is).

What occurred to me this weekend is that I am dishonoring my Mom’s memory and have forgotten everything that I learned from her death. I am doing myself a serious disservice at the same time that could lead to much bigger health problems than what I feel now. I used to always say that no matter what religion we believe in, in this lifetime, we are only given 1 body. We owe it to ourselves to treat it well and protect it… Needless to say, those words have now made their way onto my bulletin board. This weekend’s epiphany was more powerful and meaningful than anything I could have read in a fitness magazine or website or could have heard from one of the contestants on The Biggest Loser, even though I love that show…

So I decided to start my Marathon training early take advantage of the lovely weather we had this weekend and I went running. I also decided that when I run the Montreal Marathon this year, I will run in honor of my mother – Mary Kilsdonk and raise money for the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada.