Summer Slump
Long time, no post! But don’t worry—I’m back. You might be wondering why I’ve been so absent from this blog lately, and I’m here to address that exact question.
In the past few weeks since summer began, I’ve been a little bit off my game. Nothing serious—just a little bit of a slump in exercise and eating and productivity that I’m excited to work my way out of in the coming days and weeks. That said, I’ve been feeling unmotivated in all of those areas, and at first I didn’t want to blog about it because I didn’t want to be a downer to all of you guys, my loyal readers whom I imagine read this blog for relatable stories of food and fitness and motivational purposes. But then I realized that having a slump is relatable. I don’t want to be just another fitness persona on social media and the internet pretending that my life and my training are perfect all the time. Trust me, they aren’t. So, in the interest of transparency and being authentic and genuine, let me tell you a little bit about my recent slump.
Going into summer, I was excited to have more free time on my hands to devote to blogging and exercising, particularly running. My only real plan was to spend my time reading about four hundred pages of literary criticism per week in preparation for writing my honors thesis in the coming year. I figured I would pick up a part time job or two to have some spending money, but I would mainly revel in afternoons of uninterrupted reading in the wonderfully quiet library [summer in Swem is truly unbeatable] and spend my mornings logging miles run through Williamsburg before the heat escalates come midday. Then, of course, I would come home from the library to my perfectly clean house and cook myself veritable gourmet healthy dinners with all kinds of delicacies: grilled chicken, cauliflower rice stir fry, well rounded salads, and definitely some dessert to round out the night [you know, the only meals I know how to cook]. As you may have gathered by now, my summer is not exactly going that way.
Now, I don’t want to make it seem like my summer is all bad—it’s not! I’ve been exercising most days, I’ve been doing a truly prolific amount of reading about Helen of Troy, and I have been cooking, although definitely not in any type of gourmet fashion [read: scrambled eggs, ham and cheese sandwiches, pasta]. It’s been fun being in Williamsburg—I’ve been able to hang out with friends and my boyfriend, and I’ve continued working as a caller at my school’s alumni fundraising phone room as well as picking up another job at the local Baskin Robbins, where I am gaining a disproportionate amount of muscle on my right arm from scooping ice cream for twenty hours a week. I’m enjoying myself a lot, and yet I’m still feeling a little bit “meh,” so to speak, when it comes to food and fitness—which we all know are two of my favorite things!
After mildly injuring my right knee about a month ago, it’s been surprisingly challenging to get back into running longer distances. Although I did take a week entirely off from running at the beginning of May, I will readily admit that my knee probably needed a little more time than that, but I was anxious to get back into it and not lose any of my mileage that I’d built up over the previous months. I started slow, running short distances on my own and with my parents while I was home in Massachusetts for a week, and then when I got back I continued doing the same. And while I have, for the most part, been succeeding in finishing my desired distances on these runs, I still feel anxious, unsure each time if I will actually be able to finish, despite proving my endurance to myself over and over again. At the same time, I have been feeling increasingly unmotivated and uninvested in my indoor workouts at the rec center, where I normally use the elliptical for forty minutes to an hour and then do core or a short arm- or leg-focused lift circuit.
It’s a weird feeling, this lack of investment in my workouts, and something that I haven’t felt in a while. Often, fitness is what gets me up in the morning—I want to go to the gym or go for a run; it starts my day off on the right foot, it energizes me, and it makes me feel good about my body and myself. Lately, I’ve been lacking that drive a little bit. As I work on this piece, I’ve been thinking about why that is. After one year of being especially dedicated to fitness, after many years of dipping my toe in it, why am I suddenly feeling disenchanted? Is it burnout? Is it because my weight loss has somewhat plateaued recently? I’m not sure about those questions, but I did come up with one thing that might be affecting my work[out] ethic.
While I had looked forward to relishing a summer unencumbered by the taxing schedule of classes plus work plus rowing, and squeezing in running and other workouts amongst those other activities, I actually think the lack of a busy schedule might be part of my problem. Sure, I have two jobs plus research to do, but research reading happens on my own schedule and both of my scheduled jobs most often occur in the late afternoon or evening, meaning that I’m essentially left to my own devices for the majority of my waking hours. The confidence I had at the beginning of the summer that I would wake myself up before seven every day and get off to an early start was, unfortunately, false confidence. I’ve been sleeping in until eight or even nine each morning—and I’m a morning person! Then, I often dawdle in bed checking my social media apps or even watching an episode of a show [hello, season five of Gossip Girl] before I do anything productive. By the time I eat a quick breakfast, it’s often ten o’clock before I’m even ready to work out, which of course does not help my running agenda since it’s already hot by that time of day. So, I run or otherwise work out, shower, eat lunch, go to the library for research, head home around four to relax for an hour before I make dinner, and then drive over to work around six. Those are my days.
Sleeping in is not conducive to productivity though, at least for me. And once I’ve lounged in bed for a while, that just-woke-up burst of energy has faded, and I have to drag myself to the gym or out into the heat to run. So why am I not waking up earlier? Yeah, I know, it’s a really obvious solution. But I have to tell you guys, it’s way harder than it sounds. When you don’t have anywhere to get to in a timely fashion during the day, why wake up at seven-thirty? I guess now I know the answer: to avoid a slump [or at least try to combat it]!
Now that I’ve told you guys a little bit about what’s been going on with me, I also want to talk about what I’m going to try to do to fix it! And please if anyone else has ever experienced anything like this, definitely drop me a comment or an email or some other form of communication and let me know how you pulled out of a slump. I miss loving my workouts and my runs and I want to get back to that mindset. So, here are some of my ideas that I’m going to try to commit to in the next week to get back on track and reconnect with my love for fitness and enjoyment of eating balanced meals:
Scintillating Super Slump [-Beating] Strategies:
Commit to a standard bedtime and wake-up time – I may not have a schedule enforced on my by others, but I’m going to try to enforce one on myself. I’m thinking for weekdays I’ll try for an 11 o’clock bedtime and a 7:30 wakeup. With those times, I can get enough sleep to feel perky when I wake up and be ready to run or exercise by eight in the morning, before it gets too hot and uncomfortable! I’m going to try this tomorrow morning and hopefully keep it up next week!
Disconnect – instead of letting myself get sucked into the black hole of Instagram first thing in the morning and dissipating my wake-up energy, I’m going to swear off my phone for thirty minutes before I go to bed and after I wake up. I’m hoping that’ll be enough time for me to get out of bed and start the day without the encumbrance of watching twenty snap stories.
Trader Joe’s – I know this isn’t technically a verb to anchor my strategy in, but it might as well be! It’s not actually much more expensive than my local Food Lion, but it has a lot of healthy options that I really enjoy, and I think getting some of my favorite balanced meals from TJ’s will remind me that pasta is not, in fact, the only dinner I enjoy. Cauliflower crust pizza and Mango & Cream yogurt, here I come!
Schedule time for myself – while it might seem unnecessary to block out time for myself in this summer of superfluous free time, I think it’ll be helpful to earmark an hour a day specifically for me, time in which I can’t feel like I should be doing more reading. I imagine I’ll do a variety of different things with this time, but I’m hoping specifically delineating it as such will help me remain focused on more “productive” activities the rest of the day.
I was going to try for six strategies for the sake of alliteration [Six! Super! Slump! Strategies!], but I’ll settle for four right now. Besides, I don’t want to get too ambitious with it—I really want this to be both attainable and sustainable. Even the simple act of listing out these strategies is already making me feel more motivated. I’m excited to make these small changes and see what it can do for me. I’ll definitely keep you guys posted, as I hope to spend some of my personal time working on this blog and restoring it to its former biweekly post glory!
One more thing before I sign off for today: I just want to say that I’m feeling very grateful for my network of readers [all of you lovely people]! Writing this post is one step towards getting past this slump, I think, and I’m looking forward to sharing more about my summer and future fitness, food, and fun endeavors with you all. Thanks for being awesome!
