Too Much Work

I was doing great - working out, got my 200hr Yoga Teacher Certification, then got my NASM Personal Trainer Certification - AND I was starting to apply what I learned in both to my personal routines. Then my "real job" got really busy. I wanted to workout, I wanted to run, but I decided in the moment that work was more important... for a little while. Before I really realized it, six moths had passed, and I had gained 10 pounds - and also lost the little abs I was starting to see from my dedicated workouts before. Why did I decide work was more important? Because thats what I do.. I put work before me, until I realize how long I have been doing it - I am sure many of you do the same; maybe its your day/night job, maybe its your parenting, maybe its assisting a loved one. We all know that we should take care of ourselves, spend some me time, but we don't. So, after six months of working like a crazy person; I rightly decided "that's enough" (more on that below), and I went on a run, then the next day I did it again.. and then again! And guess what.. I got just as much work done as when I didn't take some time out for me. I suspect there are a couple of reasons for this: One is that when I work too much, I tend to zombie a bit, sleeping more, and zoning out on my phone for minutes at a time. When I take the time to exercise, read, or do something else for me, that time gets replaced with the useful activity, instead of adding to it. I suspect that either way my brain just needs a break, and it will take that mental break in the form of useless redditing or a run - but only one of those things really does me any good.

For me, execise is also a great way to de-stress. When I said I decided "that's enough", its a little bit of an oversimplification: while sitting in my hotel room, raging at my work laptop because IT services were having issues and I needed to get work done - THAT is what I had enough of - at least at that moment. I luckily decided to give up, let it sit and go on a run. I was mad because I had things to do, it was already late, and with Outlook down that was going to put me even further behind. About five minutes into the run, my brain started to work its way out of the funk and appreciate that I stepped away and did something better than sit in the room and angrily wait on e-mail to function. I got back into the rythm I got less and less angry, and more and more glad for the service disruption. It is really what kicked me back into the swing of things, and out of the "work work work" mentality I had slid into. It probably helped that my run took me by a little man-made pond with a few adorable little turtles that were out sunning themselves - and some ladies ultra-friendly dog that decided it would rather run with me than walk with her on a little turn around loop.

I also stopped doing keto during this time. I still like the idea of the diet, however, with the beef allergy, being on travel makes it unreasonably difficult to eat keto. While its easy to get a burger with lettuce instead of a bun, your options are significantly more limited with beef out of the equation. Speaking of beef - I really like beef, enough that I re-tested it three times to make sure. Each time resulted in food poisoning style issues within 1-2 hours of eating it. With limited options, I would rather have a nice quinoa arugala salad instead of "crap keto". With the proliferation of market style food stops, that sort of option is significantly easier to find on the run than keto options. While being on keto I also noticed that running hills was hard. If I had a cheat day (nearly always cheese enchiladas, the corn tortillas blow the keto carb budget), I noticed that a subsequent hill run was much less horrible. The keto experiment was pretty hard-core for about 4 months, and I expect the only reason I would repeat it is if I decide to start marathon training and find that I bonk at some point. The traditional "keto wisdom" holds that you shouldn't bonk (run out of running fuel), because you will already be fully adapted to fat burning, even if you are a pretty skinny marathoner, you will always have a bit more stored on your body to burn. I have not yet convinced my knee that running more than a 10k is acceptible, so that will be a personal experiment for a future date.

I have no doubt that my on-the-wagon, off-the-wagon, back on-the-wagon experience is familar to many of you. I hope that being reminded that you really should take the time out for you might be enough to nudge you out of it before its been 6 months and 10 pounds (or the sad loss of abs). So, get out there -- what are you doing still wasting time on the internet??