only shopping at second hand stores such as Goodwill, Plato’s Closet, Clothes Mentor & Salvation Army<\/em>. There will be a separate blog post coming on everything I found on this fun challenge, I highly recommend doing it!<\/p>\nI am so excited to see what 2015 has in store for me, will update you soon on some of the new things I am going after. How did your goals for 2014 go? What will you be going after in 2015? Please do share!<\/p>\n
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There was A LOT that happened in 2014…almost too much to handle. I got married to an amazing man and accomplished some pretty lofty goals I set out for myself. To see all the goals, visit my 2014 Goals tab. Here are a few highlights… Qualify for the Boston Marathon This was my big one, and I did it by the skin of my teeth. My final time was a 3:34:56 and I needed a sub 3:35 to qualify. Unfortunately, with the high volume of registration I still did not make the cut to get into the actual race. I won’t lie- I cried about this for a good day. But then I set it free, Boston is not going anywhere and I know I will get there eventually. It was a huge feat for me personally to even post a qualifying time and took a lot of hard work to get there. My first marathon time was a 4:26 and I never dreamed I could be in the 3:30s! Don’t let the little things bother me This was tough, this was a constant work in progress and something I had to be conscious of at all times and still do. With having a stressful year at work, it made being positive and not letting little things get to me very difficult. But I will tell you what made it easier…time. This is the first year since I started working at age 14 where I only had one job to focus on. In college, I worked 20-30 hours a week on top of school and being an ahtlete. When I started my career at AU, I still babysat, worked odd jobs and did personal training on the side. Until this year, I worked at least 60 hours a week if not more…every week. Year after year. This year, I slowly cut back on my personal training clients and other side jobs because adding grad school in the mix was finally too much. This was a hard decision to make but it was the best. If I had not done that, I would have had a nervous breakdown by now. No doubt. What does this have to do with not letting the little things bother me? I have more TIME to focus on the priorities at hand, to reflect and to just be. I was still crazy busy, but I was not having meltdowns over the silliest things. I hope I never go back to keeping a schedule like I did, not sure how I did it all those years to be honest with you! Plan a wedding for under $10,000 Didn’t quite meet this goal, but man did I try. Our guest list turned out much higher than we anticipated which threw our budgeted numbers off a little (turns out when you date for 9 years everybody wants to come to your wedding). But we pulled a wedding that had 235 guests off for CLOSE to $10,000! I have said it before and I will say it again…I would marry Shain all over in a heartbeat..but would NOT do the wedding again. Turns out getting married and having a wedding are not at all related to each other. No sireee not for me. Purchase NOTHING new (clothes, shoes) In 2012, I made a challenge to myself to not buy any new clothes for an entire year. And aside from one purchase at the Chicago Marathon expo, I did it. I bought nothing else all year. For 2014, I decided to do the same thing but change it up a little and gave myself the rule of only shopping at second hand stores such as Goodwill, Plato’s Closet, Clothes Mentor & Salvation Army. There will be a separate blog post coming on everything I found on this fun challenge, I highly recommend doing it! I am so excited to see what 2015 has in store for me, will update you soon on some of the new things I am going after. How did your goals for 2014 go? What will you be going after in 2015? Please do share! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,6,10],"tags":[23],"class_list":["post-1723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fitness","category-inspiration","category-running","tag-inspiration"],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.blessedinthemess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.blessedinthemess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.blessedinthemess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.blessedinthemess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.blessedinthemess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1723"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.blessedinthemess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2897,"href":"http:\/\/www.blessedinthemess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723\/revisions\/2897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.blessedinthemess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.blessedinthemess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.blessedinthemess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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