This was a healthy year for me. I'm at a good weight and I'm fitter than I've been in years. This is a good time to look back and see what worked to bring me to this point.

Running: This is certainly my biggest success. At this time last year I was suffering from a back injury and couldn't run at all. Today I can reliably run a 5k. I've actually run as far as 8.25 miles! Pretty surprising for a woman my age! I've got a lot of room for improvement. I want to run faster and further this year. I've got to work with my plantar fasciitis. I'm learning new techniques for stretching and taping my feet.

The 2-4-8 Challenge: When it was presented on a SparkTeam, I had no idea this challenge would make a such a difference in my fitness. The basis of the challenge is this: during an eight-hour period, get up once an hour and engage in two minutes of any fitness activity. That provides about 16 extra minutes of fitness per day. It took a while to really get into this. My job is terribly sedentary. I could easily sit at my computer all day, maybe getting up once or twice in 8 hours. For this challenge, I forced myself to get up once an hour and make a brisk loop through my office building, running down the steps at one end and up the steps at the other (taking a bit more than 2 minutes and adding about 350 steps each time). It was so unnatural at first, I had to set an alarm to remind myself to get up. It took weeks to get into it, but it felt good. Running the steps was enough to actually raise my heart hate a bit and I added more than a mile to my average daily total steps! It didn't interfere with my work -- I think it actually helped me to refocus my energies and made me a bit more productive. After more than a month of this behavior, I realized that many of my co-workers had noticed and it was a source of amusement among my colleagues. Believe it or not, I didn't quit. I'm laughing with them and I'm keeping it up.

The NutriBullet: I've eaten more kale since getting the NutriBullet than in my entire life before. I've been eating a salad for lunch and fruit for snacks each workday for the past several years. Adding a vegetable smoothie as a daily breakfast has made it easy to increase my fruit/vegetable servings to about 10 per day. It also has also enabled me to easily meet my goals for dietary fiber. That's got to be good for my health, especially considering my family history of colon cancer.

It's all about progress, not perfection, right? I made a great deal of progress in 2012. I intend to stick to those things that worked. There are plenty of other areas in my life that I need to address. I'm not actually making New Year's Resolutions. I'm developing habits that will serve me well in my life. I've got a lot to learn and a long way to go on this journey!

Happy New Year!