Priorities

I find it incred­i­bly inter­est­ing the things a person’s pri­or­i­ties (what they focus on) can tell you about them.

For instance, I make FI a pri­or­i­ty in my finan­cial life. I save for my 401k first, my Roth IRA sec­ond, and then spend most of what’s left over. Clear­ly, hav­ing a brand new car or top of the line out­fits com­plete with match­ing acces­sories aren’t a pri­or­i­ty for me.  Instead, I val­ue finan­cial free­dom and time spent with friends.

Even the kind of friends I hang out with empha­sizes my pri­or­i­ties. I don’t hang out with peo­ple who go to the bars every week­end to “get fucked up yo”. I like hang­ing out with active peo­ple or my fel­low nerds.

How­ev­er, I can’t say the rest of my life is effec­tive­ly prioritized.

I real­ized this the oth­er day when I got annoyed at my cat for com­ing over to me and bump­ing my phone with his head so I’d put it down and pet him instead. I went out and spent a lot of time, mon­ey, and effort to bring him into my life, and here I am ignor­ing him in order to spend more time online, look­ing at cat pic­tures. WHY would I ignore my own floof­ball, who I love with all my heart, to look at pic­tures of oth­er people’s cats?!

Look at my cute kitty!

I had anoth­er moment when climb­ing Mt. Si dur­ing Camp Mus­tache. I couldn’t even make it a mile up the path before I had to stop and take a breather. I made a vari­ety of excus­es at first.

“The air is thin here. I’m from the Mid­west where it’s flat and low­er in elevation.”

“I don’t have time to work out dur­ing the week.”

Halfway up, I real­ized how pathet­ic I sound­ed. I’m a sin­gle 25 year old woman with one office job. Of course I have time. I have noth­ing but time when I’m not at work. But instead of pri­or­i­tiz­ing my health and fit­ness, I cave to the easy path instead and take a nap. Or hang out on my couch and watch a movie. Or read­ing a book. Or play­ing a video game.

I stopped mak­ing excus­es and instead just said I’m real­ly out of shape. I may look like I’m in good shape, but I’m not. Too many hours sit­ting in front of my com­put­er at work and snack­ing on free can­dy is start­ing to have an effect on my body.

I’ve nev­er not been in shape. I swam com­pet­i­tive­ly for ten years through my senior year of high school, while also play­ing orga­nized soft­ball and doing a vari­ety of oth­er phys­i­cal activ­i­ties (walk­ing miles around, upside down, and all over the local Girl Scout camp comes to mind). I always had some­one else telling me how to work out and what pre­cise­ly I need­ed to do. My senior year of high school I was not only swim­ming rough­ly 4 miles a day, I was also in a weights class instead of gym class. I was ripped. Shred­ded. 115 lbs of pure mus­cle. I could bench 150 lbs and squat almost 3x my body weight.

After high school, I went to col­lege and joined ROTC. They made us work out 3 times a week, and encour­aged us to do more out­side of the orga­nized workouts.

Then, I left for basic where I had very large, very loud, and some­times very scary peo­ple yelling at me to pro­vide moti­va­tion dur­ing our PT ses­sions 6x a week. I was incred­i­bly moti­vat­ed and left basic in great shape. I start­ed to slide in tech school where we still had to work out, but it was almost a joke after basic. Google some­thing called the Keesler Shuf­fle if you don’t believe me.

I came back to col­lege and my sav­ing grace was walking/biking all around cam­pus and the town to get to places. I was forced to burn off all the calo­ries from the sub­stan­dard food that I got for free from the cafe­te­rias thanks to my schol­ar­ship. I have no doubt I ate more since it was free than I would’ve had I had to pay for it all.

So then I grad­u­ate from school and go to work. 8 ish hours a day of sit­ting in front of a com­put­er. My attempts at mak­ing myself work out have worked for a bit, but have most­ly failed. I was pret­ty reli­gious about going to work out before my trip to Aus­tralia, but after that I didn’t have a real­ly super duper com­pelling rea­son to go. At this point in life, telling myself I need to do it for my health fell on deaf ears. At least I was in charge of my own food and eat­ing more or less healthy. I was get­ting local, organ­ic, antibi­ot­ic free meat from a near­by farm that was super lean and super deli­cious, but also pair­ing it with ice cream (on occa­sion) and alco­hol (more than occasionally).

Lit­tle by lit­tle, so grad­u­al­ly I bare­ly even noticed, the inch­es start­ed to creep on. The work pants I bought 3 years ago as an intern, that I had to hold up with a belt, are now more than a lit­tle tight. My jeans don’t fit. Shirts are start­ing to be filled out instead of hang­ing loose­ly like they used to.

So, start­ing today, not tomor­row, not next Mon­day, I’m mak­ing work­ing out a pri­or­i­ty for me. Just mak­ing a dec­la­ra­tion doesn’t mean any­thing with­out any action­able steps, so I’m lay­ing those out too:

1. Ride my bike to work every day between now and June 25^th. I’m par­tic­i­pat­ing in a 25 mile bike ride for MS so I should real­ly start bik­ing to get into shape for that. That’s 3 miles a day roundtrip, and more if I take the loop around the build­ing before or after my work day.
2. Do 50 pushups and situps a day. It’s not that bad if it’s bro­ken out into small­er chunks through­out the day.
3. Attend one work­out class after work a week. I have a fit­ness cen­ter I can use for FREE in the build­ing and I’ve bare­ly even been inside it.
4. Go play pick­up soc­cer on Thurs­days and soft­ball on Sundays.
5. No snacks from work! I’m only going to eat food I bring in, which is only healthy stuff at the moment.

I think these steps will help me get back in shape soon­er rather than lat­er. I real­ly don’t want to have to go out and buy new clothes because I was lazy!

What’s a pri­or­i­ty for you? What do you find your­self neglecting?