self care

What We Deserve

A year ago, my weekdays followed the fairly same routine.

Get up, sometimes work out, but most often I wouldn’t have the energy. Shower, breakfast, and then on the train for 45 minutes. At the office, I would cautiously check my email to see what fires needed to be put out, and then I would either hop on conference calls or start creating content. Lunch was always left overs or a salad from home, and the rest of the day would be set to survival mode. 4:30 p.m. came and then I was free and trying to make the next few hours last as long as I could before I would have to get up and do it all again.

I was not happy in previous career, and so I decided to make a big change in going back to school. At first, it was exhilarating and exciting, but a year later, the consequences of such a big change have been plaguing me.

As a graduate student, there is much more on my plate. In my career, I juggled projects but I was quite intentional about keeping work in the designated hours. Now, I am using every bit of the day to minimize my to-do list. With school work, two jobs, marathon training, and maintaining a life, it’s hard to fit everything in. This week, I made an hour-by-hour schedule in hopes of feeling somewhat in control of my schedule.

Also, going to school in my mid-30s has put me in a different set of circumstances than many of my friends, who are buying houses, having kids, and climbing the ranks of their respected careers. I am working a part-time retail job (which I enjoy) and living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Being a full-time student is hard, and there are times when I think I must suffer through it. I should be doing homework at 9 p.m. on a Saturday night. Or, waking up at 4:30 a.m. to get in a run is just part of the deal. By stepping outside of the normal routine for a woman my age, I was agreeing to be miserable with an unstable finances and uncontrollable schedule. That’s what I get for doing something out of conventional expectations.

Today was my day off, and so I wanted to take sometime to recuperate before another busy weekend. I took a two-hour deep nap, watched some trashy TV, and splurged on a bottle of $6.99 wine. When I say my day off, that’s relative. I still worked my school job (which I can do from home), took a final exam that lasted for two hours, and completed a fairly hard workout. Even so, I felt guilty about the nap and didn’t think I really deserved the wine. I argued that I was so lucky to have Tuesdays like this, that most people are slaving away at jobs, so who am I to enjoy a long nap in the middle of the day?

It’s often easy to think we don’t deserve things, or to be any kind of pleasure at the end of accomplishments. I don’t really need to take that trip to visit my college friend. Or, if only I can lose 10 pounds, I will let myself get that dress that I really want. We often restrict ourselves so much that when we do indulge we overdo it, whether it be food, alcohol, or shopping. We think that if we aren’t working hard, we don’t deserve to relax. We must sweat. We must shed tears. We must endure hardships, and then only then, can we have a reward.

This often happens in running. In May, I ran my first half marathon in eight years, and I had a big goal to break 2 hours (more on this later). However, I went out fast and was eight minutes slower than I had hoped. What I don’t tell people when I share this story is that I also PR’ed by 17 whole minutes. That is incredibly impressive, and yet I wouldn’t let myself bask in that glory because my primary goal wasn’t met.

Often, runners only focus on times, and we forget to look at other accomplishments we may have that don’t involve the clock. Maybe we didn’t get a PR that day, but we were better with nutrition and avoided bonking. Or, we encouraged a fellow runner out on the course and helped her overcome a specifically dark time. We don’t allow ourselves to enjoy successful or indulgent moments outside of our expected goals, because we don’t think we deserve them.

This morning, I dominated a hard workout, and then I spent two hours giving my best on a final exam. Not only did I earn that nap and glass of wine, I deserved it. Graduate school, and the life that comes with it, is hard enough, but I have to make time to enjoy it and take care of it. It doesn’t all need to be a slog fest. Changing my life allows me to spend my Tuesdays in a different way, and that won’t always be the case when I graduate and am building up my career, so I better enjoy it.

Just because we made a choice to live differently, to take a more unique path, doesn’t mean we have to suffer. We deserve to enjoy pleasures and to relax, because if we don’t, we’ll lose sight of what we are trying to accomplish, and we’ll lose ourselves.

Rest Day

My alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. this morning as it does most mornings. Despite not working a full-time job, my days are incredibly full with marathon training, working at the running store, my graduate assistant job, and school, so I need an early start. However, such a packed schedule is leaving me exhausted lately and that 5ish wakeup is getting harder and harder to make.

When the alarm dinged, I went into the routine debate: if I take less time for breakfast, I can sleep an extra 10 minutes, OR, I could do my run between work and meeting a friend this evening. I could feel my tight legs begging for a reprise, but a speed workout was booked for the day. This scheming and planning was wasting time, and I knew I needed to make a decision. Then, I pulled out my phone and looked at training schedule from last week. My last rest day was a week ago. No wonder why everything hurt. I reset my alarm for two hours later and turned over.

During my last marathon training cycle, which was in 2015, I ran four days a week with three off. That was an extra day than I done in the previous training cycle, but I thought more rest suited me. Then, when training for a half marathon this winter, I knocked the off days down to two, most often because I needed a break from Chicago’s unrelenting weather. For this marathon, I am down to one day a week. It wasn’t a big decision, and really one I didn’t notice when I was creating my plan, but I knew I wanted to have a strong training cycle and just one day made sense.

“Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.  Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.” – Maya Angelou

So far, one day is working well for me, but because I often have to rearrange workouts in my schedule, the rest days aren’t one consistent day, and sometimes I forget to put them on the calendar.

The expert advice is that we should listen to our bodies, but I don’t think I’ve ever really understood what that means. Like many women, especially female athletes, I’ve long had a complicated relationship with my body and have pushed and abused it for not being what I want it to be. My body and I, we don’t really talk to each other. I’ve gotten better tuning into it’s needs as I’ve aged, but I am still unsure if my body is telling me to take a break or my mind is trying to sabotage me, as it tends to do.

This morning, though, I am fairly certain my body was screaming, “BREAK!” Not just from running, but my crazy schedule. Unfortunately, I am not sure I will have a day completely free of school, work, and running until, I don’t know, graduation, but I can steal back hours for myself, including this morning.

Our society puts a lot of pressure on us to go, go, go, with messages that only those that work hard deserve sweet rewards. However, we aren’t built to push for forever.

Someone I follow on Instagram was saying how the grit and strive of sport is great, and while she has been chasing that for years, she wonders if it is not working for her anymore. I commented on her post that sometimes we need to take an “inhale moment”, in which we pause, breathe in the goodness and forget about producing and accomplishing. Having goals and working towards them is a definitive part of life, but it doesn’t need to be our constant goal. We need those rest days to remember why we are chasing those dreams and allow our bodies and minds to recover and be strong again.

Today, I am taking a full rest day. I still have to work, at both jobs, but I didn’t run this morning and I will probably take the train instead of biking to my job. I’ve got a big weekend of running ahead of me, and I want to work with my body to get there, not against it.

Are you resting today? How many rest days do you have in a training cycle? How do you like to spend your rest days, in running and life?