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i fail at balancing work and exercise and my personal life. i honestly don't understand how people can work full time and manage to get a good workout in and keep up social ties everyday. it's a triangle, and i can only manage one side at a time.
take for instance early january to early february. i renewed my gym membership and dedicated my all to making sure that i was prepared for half marathon training. i went to the gym consistently, ate healthy foods, and kept myself motivated. i also made sure that i got all my workouts done on the days that i wasn't seeing my boyfriend and that i had certain nights to hang out with my friends, and i even worked some free time in to my schedule to do some fun things i like to do (shopping, outside research, the usual).
and then, early last week, it hit me: how did i have so much free time to do all this? and so i looked at my phd program timeline and realized i was overlooking a huge project. somehow, it had slipped my mind that my doctoral candidacy exam is coming up in a few months. a few months might sound like a long time, but most people dedicate about 4 months to preparing, so i had wasted serious, precious time.
so last week, i buckled down on catching up on preparing. i also committed more time to manuscript preparation and cv writing and applications to various things. pretty much all my free time was going to work and school, and what time i wasn't on campus, i was busily preparing for a romantic weekend with my guy.
you can obviously guess where this leaves me. yup. haven't made it to the gym in over a week. blegh.
i seriously need to expand my balance beam skills to the full triangle. i have five races on my schedule this year (potentially adding one or two more) and i want to do well in them. also, the stress eating in addition to my lack of exercise over the past week has lead to a bloat i don't want to keep permanently on my mid-section. but, i don't want to slack on my professional development or my personal relationships. it's tough, and i just don't know how to deal with it.
any advice?
-b
p.s. if you're wondering how i found time to do a blog post, it's because i literally couldn't look at my dataset for one more second and desperately needed a break/vent sesh.