The secret to living a balanced life.

Every once in a while someone, perhaps a fellow parishioner, or another mother in our preschool music class, or someone who reads my blog, will say to me:  "Aren't you the one who is some kind of fitness fanatic?  Who runs and swims all the time?"

No, no, I'm not.

It's really kind of funny.  I'm not sure how I give the impression that I spend lots and lots of time at the gym. 

Here is my theory.  I think it must be pretty rare for someone who gets a medium amount of regular exercise to be all excited about it and want to write and talk about it frequently.

It's definitely rare for you to see it as a sort of profile in the media.  The media spectrum of exercise is, I think, kind of bimodal, with a broad peak around "not a whole lot of exercise" and a smaller, intense peak around "fitness fan."  

I mean, we all know about couch potatoes, right?  And we all know about people who are constantly thinking about taking up a fitness plan, and maybe starting up a new one here and there or making hopeful and unrealistic New Year's resolutions, but petering out quickly?  And we all know about people who get active on a weekend, but not during the week, right?

Also, we all know about Olympic athletes and marathoners and Ironman competitors, and we know about those people in Thin For Life who say that they only manage to keep the pounds off with 90 minutes of cardio every single day, and we know about those people who say that they would go nuts if they didn't have a run, and we know about people who are actively training for a race (and if you have seen the recommended training programs, they are all at least 5 workouts a week), and we know about the marketing-defined consumer category of "fit moms" who "spend nearly every free minute working out, cross-training for triathlons and scheduling regular boot camps and yoga."  (I wrote about that here.)

Since I get to the gym regularly, and since I write about my own experiences as a runner and swimmer, I must be in the latter peak, right?

No.  I don't think I am.

This is my fitness regimen:

• One swim per week.  Ideally, a swimmer's mile in 40 minutes.  Often I only have 20 or 30 minutes.
• One run per week.  Ideally, I go 5K (including the warmup distance) or 45 minutes.  Often I only have 20 or 30 minutes total.
• One more, either swim or run, 30-45 minutes.

So no.  I do not work out every day.  I do not even work out 5 days a week.  

Well, then, I must aspire to that, right?  And I must wish I had the resolve, or could get my priorities in order, to become one of those?  To run half-marathons instead of just 5Ks, to get to the gym every morning, to take six-mile outdoor runs for fun, to add yoga and kettlebells?  

Not right now.

Why not? After all, the experts tell us the minimum is something like 30 minutes of moderate exercise 5 days a week, right, plus strength training?  

Answer:  Because I have a lot of other things going on, and I am not willing to cut back on the other things.  That's the truth.

 And (here's the part that explains why I write so happily and often about my medium level of fitness) -- I'm really satisfied with it right now.  I enjoy my three workouts a week.  I feel so great when they're done and I can check them off, and feel the slight ache that stays with me all the next day to remind me that I am still taking halfway-decent care of myself.  And on my four "rest" days, I am glad not to have to fit one more thing into my busy days.  Don't get me wrong -- if I get the chance to go hiking or bowling or take a walk with my husband or play in the park with the kids, I add that in and am grateful.  But I really want to teach and tidy and cook and blog and read and go out on the weekends, too, and if all my "me time" was working out, it would be hard to do all that.

Another thing: at this level, I don't grapple with constant low-level injuries, and I have yet to hit the plateau where a little more training doesn't gain much performance.  These are both nice bonuses.

+ + +

I decided last night, as I was settling into bed after my run (which had to be only 25 minutes because I split the gym time with Mark, since the 2.5-year-old refused to go into the childcare) that I had figured out the way to lead a balanced life.

The secret to leading a balanced life is to be satisfied with significantly less than the expert-recommended minimum of everything that's important.

I take an "expert's" idea of minimum requirements with a grain of salt.    Every "expert" is, by definition, narrowly focused on the thing that they know something about.  They see their job as promoting THEIR THING.  Often that is the expert's job:  to tell you to floss twice a day and brush after every meal (if he's a dentist), or to give you pages and pages of homeschooling history curriculum (if she's a history curriculum writer), or to suggest that you remove all your carpets and replace all your mattresses and pillows frequently (if they're advising you on your kid's dust mite allergy)  or to suggest that you shine your sink every morning and remember to dust the light diffusing globes in each room every month (if she is FlyLady).

One expert advocates for the best way to care for teeth, another expert advocates for the best way to treat allergies, a third for the best way to teach your child one subject, a fourth advocates for the best way to keep a clean organized home, and so on and so on.  That is their job.  Your job is to listen to all of this advice (politely and calmly, remembering that each is doing his own job in advising you narrowly) and figure out how much of each you can reasonably do in order to take care of your job -- which is neither teeth nor allergies nor history nor a clean house, but a whole family of whole persons.

The best way to take care of a whole person, or a whole family, is not the sum of the best way to take care of each of his or her parts.

You have to do less than the minimum, because we are each far more than a collection of minimum requirements.  

+ + +

This isn't to say that I don't look forward, someday, to squeezing in a fourth workout a week, or figuring out how to include regular strength training (which I concede is important, such that "zero" is probably way way under the recommended minimum, even though that amount fits quite nicely into my lifestyle).  My current plan is to wait for the kids to get older.  I walk a fine line between waiting till menopause (when I know I won't have any more little kids who will refuse to go in the child care) and waiting till menopause (by which time strength training will become even more important).  

But it is to say that you can, in fact, do things only half way, and still gain a whole lot.

Comments

[Kelly]

A long time ago, I took a little home organization class offered at my Y. One of the mottos they taught us was "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." That is, if you decided that you can only do something if you do it perfectly, by working out 7 days a week or whatever, so then you never do it because you won't be doing it the One Right Way, then you will never get around to doing it. If it's worth doing, then you should do it even if it is less than the ideal, because it's still better than never doing it at all.

So, bravo on embracing that one!

[Jenny]

This is a great post! "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly" is GK Chesterton, I think.

I struggle with perfectionism so end up doing nothing for fear of not doing it "right." I need to do more worthwhile stuff badly.

[Rebekka]

Awesome post.

[LeeAnn B]

I have time to workout five days a week and I often do (45 minute martial arts class) since I always feel better after some good exercise. But it makes life rough for the family (who also do class three to five times a week) if we are gone from home all evening, every evening. I hate to pass up an opportunity but I am starting to realize we need more time at home or time to do other things than exercising. My workout is both my "job" and my adult social time, so hard to skip it.

[LeeAnn B]

I also usually walk (with some running) three miles once a week with other mom friends. As a lifelong non-runner, I am working up to a goal of running three miles for next year's black belt test.

[Bearing]

That's great, Leeann! It always gives me a warm feeling to hear of lifelong non-runners learning to run a real distance :)

[Cathie]

As I sit here on my pc for the first time in a week and look at my house, I think...well said!

[Jennifer Fitz]

I think this is my new favorite post in the world.

Three times a week. I can do that.

[Dorian Speed]

I am going to print this out and staple it to my face. To my FACE.

[Christian]

My secret to living a balanced life assuming that it is indeed balanced: being able to say NO.

[Amy Jane (UntanglingTales)]

Delicious. Thanks for putting this into words.

And I have that GKC quote scrawled on half a torn 3x5 card on the front of my fridge-- because it seemed like such a better-fitting tribute to the words than a framed calligraphy piece.

Or maybe because I haven't thought of it at the right time.

But I like the first explanation better.

[Bearing]

Dorian: Pics or it didn't happen.

[Tabitha]

My best friend's mom once told me "Don't add more to enough." This was in reference to homeschool curricula/subjects but I find it applies to so many areas of life. I'd never applied it to exercise, but you just gave awesome examples of that. Kind of your whole diet philosophy, too! Love this post, especially as the schoolyear gets underway. Thanks for the insight and reminder.

[Christy P.]

I am reminded of my favorite (at this moment) quote from The Simpsons "Zero's a percent" -- Lindsay Nagle (in reference to the recycled paper content of a newspaper which was described to contain a certain percentage of recycled paper)

[MrsDarwin]

I run once a week, about a mile, and I do about fifteen minutes of strength training once a week. As a workout routine it's probably not sufficient to make any gains, and yet it's better than doing nothing at all. I can feel the difference in weeks when I do nothing.

I only enjoy exercise in that small sweet period in which you're warmed up and feeling all athletic and buff but before you're just enduring to the end. My hope is that that window will widen. Running last night with my daughter, who hasn't done much of that activity, I could see the gains I'd made in the past six years. When I ran the 5k the other weekend, I was glad to see that I wasn't the last person in the pack -- though I probably was the last woman in my age group!

[Barbara C.]

Paul McCartney is an amazing composer, but he has also written some greatly terrible lyrics over the many years. My husband and I have this theory that sometimes he just writes down whatever pops into his head, even if it's complete jibberish, says "That's bloody good enough."

"That's bloody good enough" has become my mantra whenever I half-ass something because I just don't have any more time or energy to devote to it.

And with a newborn again it has been getting a lot of use again lately. :-)

[bearing]

It occurred to me that it might be helpful to mention that when I *first* took up swimming (long before I started running), I only went *twice* a week.