Hi puples!!
Welcome to my first weekly blog post. Each Sunday I will write a blog about something relevant to either mindset, weightloss, health or wellness. A lot of the time, it will be something from my own personal experience that I feel may be important enough to pass on at the time, as is the case this week. I hope that my weekly ramblings help you in some way!
This week I have been reminded of a very important lesson and it is something that I know a lot of us struggle with. So many of us run around trying to fit as much into our days as possible. So many of us are time poor and for a variety of different reasons. We may be running our own businesses, we may be working parents trying to juggle work, children and the myriad of other things that we need to attend to on a daily basis. Quite often, we suffer from lack of sleep and just being generally tired from being so busy. I myself have been very guilty of this in the last 5 months, as I am working 2 businesses and training for 2 major events in July. The first one is the Gold Coast Marathon on the 3rd of July and the second one is the Gold Coast Kokoda Challenge on the 16/17th July. The marathon is 42.2km and the Kokoda Challenge is 96km, so they are both gruelling events and take a lot of training. I have been burning the candle at both ends, not getting a lot of sleep on a regular basis, and putting my body through a gruelling training schedule as well. What happened? I got sick of course!
When I was 180kg, I got sick all the time. I wasn’t very healthy (obviously!) and whenever anyone got sick, I always got it. In the last 3 years, I have rarely gotten sick because my immune system was so healthy and would fight off anything before it became an issue. The most I would get would usually be a sore throat that would go away after a day. My body was so run down because of lack of sleep and my training schedule, that basically this time it didn’t have the strength to fight, I had sickness all around me and I went down like a sack of potatoes. As soon as I got sick I knew that I had to rest. I only had 5 weeks until the marathon & 7 weeks until Kokoda and I needed to get better as soon as possible. So while I didn’t stop training completely, I did reduce the intensity of my regular daily training sessions and I cut out any event training. No running and no Kokoda training for 2 weeks. I made sure I ate extra healthy and that I got plenty of sleep.
It was actually 2 and a 1/2 weeks before I went for my first run which was only 5km. Yesterday I went for my first decent run since getting sick 3 weeks ago and I did 10km. What I found was that my times were better. By a long shot! Before I got sick I was struggling to keep my time per km to under 9 minutes and they were all pretty close to the 9 minute mark and sometimes over. Yesterday all of my km’s were just over 8 minutes. I did my best time for 7km ever – it usually takes me about 1hr 2 minutes to do 7km, and yesterday I did it in just over 57 minutes. I was forced to take a rest that I KNOW I would not have taken if I hadn’t gotten sick and it did me the world of good. I am well behind the 8 ball with my distance for the marathon due to injury issues and my recent sickness, but at this late stage it is not going to do me any good to dwell on it. All I can do is keep doing the best that I can do and as I am still recovering, I need to remember not to push my body too much or I will relapse.
So today I am reminding you all that sometimes, life gets really crazy and we just keep doing what we have to do. At some point, we need to take stock and force ourselves to take some time out. Quite often, much to our surprise, we will find that we get better results because we did take that time out to rest and recuperate!
Have a wonderful week and I will talk to you next Sunday!
Shari
xoxo