Manage Well & You Can Do It All

Remember how easy it was to be active in high school? What about when we were student-athletes in college and working out was just part of our daily routine? Is that still the case?

Once you graduate, you get a job, and your time doesn’t belong to you anymore, which is the main reason why people forget to focus on their body and health. Do you really think “I’ll get through this first year of work and then I’ll start” is the right way to go about it?

No! It’s not…

Your health and well-being is important on top of being completely correlated to your professional workflow and efficiency. Let's talk about what we can do to bring up our fitness, happiness, and overall health.

Schedule yourself

Let's be real, you did it in high school and college, why would adulting be any different? Yeah you have a job and you might be a little more tired than when you were 18, but remember how you would rally in the middle of the week to go out and party even though you knew you had practice at 6am and class at 8am?

First tip: decide what are your priorities.
Do you want to be active every day? Do you want to run a marathon? Do you want to make heads turn this summer? The reason doesn't matter as long as it's important to you.

Second tip: plan out your day.
If you know you have to work late, do your workout in the morning. Plus you’ll start your day on a far better note! It has been a fight for me this year to do this because my class schedule changed all the time and didn't always match my teammates’. One day I’m rowing at 6am, another I’m running during my lunch break, or just erging by myself at 8:30pm. This is where your priorities kick in, if you really want it, you’ll do it even if it’s at an unreasonable time. Why do you think they made 24/7 gyms!?

Third tip: set yourself for success.
Ok, so we are getting up super early or going to bed super late, what’s my next step? Sleep and eat accordingly. That’s all you need to do to complete the circle. When I need to get up early, I go to bed earlier. ALWAYS try to get those 8 hours! And if I know I won’t have time to cook or eat during my lunch break, pre-make it so you have it ready once you’re done. Damn, it's so simple, right?!

Commit. It’s a lifestyle.

Once you’ve started, it just becomes a lifestyle until someone or something starts being an obstacle. That’s when you have to commit!

First tip: No obstacles.
This is exactly like trying to quit smoking, don’t let people around you dictate your life. I’m not saying you should push people away, not at all! Actually, surround yourself with people who live this same lifestyle. Occasionally, a girlfriend/boyfriend/friend will try to convince you to do something else instead of working out. They need to understand how important this way of life is to you and what your goals are, but you need to communicate it to them right away. They will most likely accept how you work and might even join. This doesn't mean you shouldn't have fun, but don't cut out your workout.

Second tip: surround yourself. 
I'll be the first one to tell you it’s miserable to train by yourself. You have to do it sometimes, in the rain, in the cold, against the wind, in the dark, late at night, but if you can be part of a community or just have a training partner, do it! It’s a great way to keep your motivation up as well as having some inner squad competition.

Third tip: Find an alternative.
I guess most of us follow a training program. If you don’t, this is a good lesson to hear. For some, sticking to a precise plan is important, but it happens to find yourself in a situation where you can’t do what was planned like a lack of equipment. It is alright to switch workouts around, still respecting some rules like no heavy lifting back-to-back. I found myself a few times this year not having enough time for these long lifts we do for rowing at lunchtime, which was super frustrating and enabled me to skip it altogether. If you can fill in that gap with something similar, do it! You’ll gain something instead of just sitting around all day.

Yeah we all do a lot of stuff during the day, but every time you click “Next Episode” on Netflix or keep refreshing your Facebook feed, you are surely wasting time you could be using to treat your body like a temple. We all have to adapt to not having sports in our schedule anymore and work at including it in our daily life.

Just remember that when you are complaining about not having enough time, men and women are going to the Olympics to represent you and your country all while having kids and a job.

Much love.  

When you get comfortable...

In my last post, I kept my thoughts very broad and didn't go too much into detail about my training and goals so this will clear things up.

During the summer, while I'm taking a break, I think of what I would like to accomplish or what has been missing that could make me happier inside, even if its slightly unrealistic. Don't we all love underdogs?! So as I turned in my application for my master's program, my athletic goals were brought up: what do you plan on accomplishing in the next year? With that question I decided to create two groups because fixating on one goal is mentally grueling especially if you don't succeed. 

As a primary goal I wanted to win the French National Championships with my teammates in whatever category because that's a medal I haven't really been able to attain. To do so, a lot of training needed to be done due to the high level of the leading guys on our team. 

My secondary goal was to qualify for small boat nationals in the single and perform as well as I could against the elite. If that were to be a success, university national team spots would be in contention. 

So I'll recap how my current status holds up next to these goals. 

With a lot of good training and pushing myself to row the single as well as I could (a lot of technical changes were made), I felt confident I could contend with the best during the week leading up to the regional qualifiers. Knowing that only the top 10 could qualify (the top 4 were preselected and given a free pass due to their elite status and spot on the national team) which left truly only 6 spots behind them, it made things very interesting and exciting. As much as we try to keep ourselves healthy, somethings are out of our control and that Thursday I got the stomach flu. Of all times right... But I still decided to go down the course feeling awful just to tell myself the last 6 months of training by myself weren't for nothing. I actually believe that I was more upset than sick when I got home and lets just say I spent 5 days in and out of the bathroom... 

Now I'm left with an entire goal that I couldn't even give a try at; so disappointing. With these slight dark moments, some rays of light do poke through. Some of my teammates and I bit the bullet and took an 8 hour bus ride from Paris to London in the middle of the night to spend an entire day in London for my birthday. Why London? Because that day was the BNY Mellon Boat Race and if you know me well, I'm a fangirl! What an amazing experience and a wonderful way to spend my 24th birthday.

Onto the next goal. As much as I trained and was complimented on the work I was putting in, things felt neutral leading up tot his week. On Wednesday, we had a meeting to announce the lineups for Nationals. To my eyes, I wasn't well taken into consideration for the results I had put out, but you can't always fight the system , which leaves me now in the second boat: the quad. I'm not going to lie, the first 24 hours, every scenario and negative thought rampaged through my head, but I learned to accept my faith. It's not the first time this has happened and I am sure it won't be the last. With acceptance, I face a new challenge. The quad this year is predicted to be an extremely hard event but that truly doesn't scare me because who doesn't love an underdog, right? And this is actually fitting for the upcoming months. 

On Sunday morning we leave for a week training camp in the South of France and I plan to make my body hate me, in other words put in a lot of good strokes and hard ones too. After Nationals are over, I'll be heading back to Jacksonville in June to finally join Emily after a very long wait and to pick back up where I left off with the single. I'll be transferring from a Filippi into my Hudson and I have no doubt that it won't make the slightest of differences. I have a few quality races I'm planning on attending but I'll keep that to myself for now. 

We can plan all we want, nothing happens as designed. You might read this and think "Well everything went down the drain for him..." but to me it's all part of a larger picture that needs obstacles for the biggest reward. 

Much love.