Nothing to Complain About

My brain is tired. To coin a great phrase from Bilbo Baggins, "I feel thin. Sort of stretched. Like butter scraped over too much bread." Or something like that.

I have a biology exam tomorrow that I should be studying for right now (instead of writing this) but I needed a break.

This morning I took a fantastic break, here. I ran a stunning 7 mile loop through Doudy Draw in Boulder, CO. It was a little windy, but once in the draw, the wind was silenced by surrounding trees, and it turned out to be a beautifully sunny day.

I've been training for the Leadville Silver Rush for about 4 weeks now. Since I began, time is hard to come by. Studying for school is becoming neglected- and is most likely the main source of my stress.
I realize though, that any stress I experience as a result of being too "busy" is self-induced. I signed up for this race fully aware that it is a large time commitment, and it won't be easy.

The last several days were very stressful,  and I found myself throwing a temper tantrum, accompanied by an all-out pity party. How silly. As I posted my status for the day on Facebook, I realized that I have absolutely nothing to worry or complain about.


This morning I drove 20 minutes and was able to run across a landscape that some would gladly give their first born child, their spouse, their left leg, or all of the above, to have access to. Now I am sitting in a warm home, eating hickory barbeque chips, drinking a New Belgium Snow Day winter ale, and studying, or rather should be studying for an exam. If I fail my exam tomorrow, the world will not cease to exist, and neither will I.

So I will stop complaining, and get back to it...

Too tired to workout?

Life is busy right now. Makes me think of a great Tombstone quote, when the Mayor asks Virgil to get involved in the town's affairs, to which he replies,  "I'm busy. We're all busy." An aside; if you haven't seen this movie, you are missing out on arguably the greatest Western movie ever.

Who isn't busy these days though? It's true, we're all busy.

With school, work, and family, my calendar for the next few months looks pretty intimidating, especially with the holidays quickly approaching.

If I try to maintain too much, I find that I easily become... tired.

Training for a big event (for me it's the Leadville Silver Rush run right now) is difficult to do when you are tired. Training itself is tiring, add to it the normal business of life, and it equates to exhaustion.

It would be so easy for me to look at my responsibilities and justify a statement like, "That's too much," or, "Maybe next year," but the reality is that life is never going to let up for me. You either. Life will never present the optimal conditions to do anything easily.

While on a run with my good friend the other day, I realized that the free time to train will never be there, waiting in my schedule somewhere. I have to TAKE the time to workout. That realistically means that I will have to sacrifice something else in order to get my butt outside and on a run. Taking the time, means that something else will be sacrificed.

Naturally, there is a hierarchy established to the things that fill our calendars. For many people, exercise seems to fall to the bottom of the list first. I, however, have moved exercise to the top of the list, and into the category of must-do.

I believe that exercise, preferably done outside, is something we all must do in order to maintain physical and mental health (which are actually the same thing in my opinion but can be discussed later).

There are still many other responsibilities that I cannot neglect, which means that many days I will run on tired legs and while mentally exhausted, but this is precisely what I will feel like several hours into the Leadville Silver Rush.  At any rate, I suppose what I'm trying to say is that if you've got aspirations to get off the couch and to go exercise in some form or another, but are "too busy" or "too tired," TAKE the time, and get out there!

You're never too busy or tired to workout!