My Piggy Bank

There are some days and even weeks when fitting a workout into my schedule seems overwhelming. And when I get overwhelmed....sadly, I find it too tempting to just take the easy way out and choose to do nothing. I’m trying to turn that around with a much more positive, ‘anything is possible,’ attitude.

My husband, who has done Ironman twice, often tells me to think of my body as my own personal piggy bank. Each time you train you are dropping in coins. On race day, you dump out that piggy bank and put all your ‘savings’ into the race. So this week I thought of that metaphor a lot....and while I wish I could have been dropping in quarters with longer and harder workouts, I just dropped in a lot of pennies, nickels and a few dimes.  It all counts!

Let me give you two examples of how I made it work.

I had a conference at my daughter’s school scheduled right smack in the middle of my morning. It would have been easy to say "well I don’t have enough time to train today, so I’ll just skip it." Rather, I broke up the workout and put in 2.6 miles before the conference and an additional 2.6 miles afterwards.

Another day, I had a crazy number of errands but I was able to log a quick 3 mile run after the last chore was done. Here's how - I ran from my daughter’s school to ensure that I would not be late for carpool. Later in the day, I took the girls to the nursery at the gym and got in a quick 500 meter swim. Again, these were all mini workouts but workouts nonetheless. Cha ching!