Remember when I told you guys that I am a runner? Yeah… about that.
People who know what 4th year of medical school is like are laughing right now. It’s notorious for being the year where the world opens up to you and you think you have ample time to do everything you’ve ever dreamed of- brunching, traveling, marathoning, acting, spelunking, etc. Then, RIGHT AFTER 4th year, you are thrown into internship, where you are working ALL THE TIME and you marvel at people who have time to eat.
Lise, the intern, found it difficult to find time to exercise in these circumstances, in fact it fell to the bottom of my list when it came to thinking about my busy schedule.
I had to do something, though, because I could tell that my mental health was suffering and I was becoming tired just walking up stairs with my attendings.
These are some of the things that have been working for me.
Finding a consistent time
I exercise it at a time when no one is expecting anything of me- no one is even awake usually.
If you follow me on IG (and you should- @Analise_D) you’ve seen me running at obnoxious times in the mornings, like at 4 am. I am a morning person, so this is my jam. I don’t always love getting up, but I love the accomplishment that I feel when I’m done with my workout before I have to do anything else in my busy days. I also wanted to do it at a time that I would never be expected to be at work (except on nights, but I just flip my schedule around then).
Side tip: I try to be consistent. This is something that seems counterintuitive right? I hadn’t even even started working out and here I am talking about consistency. I say this because consistency builds habits. Habits ideally happen without even thinking about them.
When I skip a day (notice I said when, not if), I figure out the thing that prevented my workouts. Did I lose my shoes? Did I have trouble waking up? Was I immobilized by muscle soreness? Was it because of poor planning? Next time, I work around the problem or figure out a way to work through it.
Preparing the night before
If I’m planning to work out in the morning (and I almost exclusively workout in the morning), I get my workout gear together the night before. This includes socks, shoes, clothes, headphones, sweat towels, everything. This also includes getting to bed on time!
Something that I haven’t heard very much but I have noticed really helps me is getting mentally prepared. This is what I mean- I allow myself to think about working out in the morning, what I’m planning to do and how great I’m going to feel afterwards. This just helps the positive reinforcement of exercising. The more positively I think about it, the more I enjoy it and the more I associate it with how good I feel after. Honestly, this beats allowing myself to have feelings of absolute dread when I think about physical activity.
Determining my “Why”
When I was a part of Marathon Makeover, I learned that one of the ways to keep going when you feel like quitting is recalling your “Why”. WHY am I doing this? Why did I choose to run a marathon? I usually addend this why to apply to my situation at the time.
Me: Working out makes me feel good. I want to feel that way all the time. I want to pursue health and be about what I tell my patients about. Most of all, I know that taking care of my temple brings God glory.
Finding my “Why” helped working out to become a priority and also motivated me to continue when I wanted to quit, or in my case, sleep in.
How do you guys work out regularly?
Love you guys,
Lise
Like you, I found a self-rewarding goal to add to my why. You like the feeling of achieving a run or workout, while I like basketball and the feeling of being good at it. So, I’ve joined a basketball league to have a reward and workout on days I’m not playing to prepare for games. I am blessed to have my Lise cheer me on along the way.
Most importantly, however, I try to keep exercising in mind because it’s apart of our family’s goals as Christians. We’ve learned that God called us to care for our bodies, so we strive to do that. We often fail and succeed, but try to have more ups than downs.