Would Rather be Running....

Between a full-time career, full-time graduate school, an active social calender, karate and trying to run 20-25 miles a week, my life is often a study in time management and planning ahead.

 One thing I'm learning, or trying to learn, or becoming aware that I need to learn, is to not expect perfection is all of these areas all at once. There will be weeks when I'm too tired or overwhelmed to go to the grocery store to stock up on healthy foods and will survive via Wawa. There will be weekends when I'm too exhausted to get off my couch. There will be days at work when I can toil away at school work without my inbox suffering and then there will be days when I'm stuck in meetings or have deadlines and my homework won't get done. There will be nights when my brain only wants to watch The Daily Show and not write an article summary. There will be times when I will leave a chapter unread in order to get a beer with friends. There will be mornings when I will manage to get out of bed for a run. And there will be nights when I have enough energy to hit a treadmill at 9 or 9:30. And there will mornings when I didn't get to bed until 2am and a 5am run would just make for a miserable day.




It's always a balance of what you want to do and what you have to do. I am driven by an irrational fear of failure so many times my decisions are based on the lesser of two evils effect. I want to go to the gym and run but I need to do the course reading. I do not want to get fat or out of shape. But more than that- I don't want to be called on in class and not know what's going on or fail an exam. So, I rationalize that I can work out more on the weekends or that 2-5lbs can be lost. The $3,000 I'm paying for that class can only be spent once.



Running has, unfortunately, taken a back seat in all of this. Nothing makes me more upset or conflicted than the gym v. work debate. Things would be a lot easier if the ground wasn't covered in a foot of snow and topped with a sheet of ice and if the shoulders of roads weren't buried under mounds of white mess. It's simply not safe to run outside in the Northeast right now. (That is another blog post for another time.) School work v work work is easy enough to rationalize. School work v chores or socializing is another easy win. However, school v treadmill gets me every time. As I sit here with a document design book on my lap, I'm silently freaking out that I've only run 6 miles this week. How will life as I've known it for two years continue if I can't have time to run? Insert world ending noises!!

 It will. Hopefully, by time this quarter is over-not only will I have figured out what I need to do to get above a B in tech writing, but also how to give myself some credit for handling a pretty packed schedule and not beat myself up for a few missed miles or gained pounds.