Oh dear. It's been a summer and a half. August into September has not been my strongest in terms of exercise, and my body is really feeling it after eight weeks off everything - Pilates, yoga, cycling (bar a little here and there), and I haven't swum in months. I have been back to yoga a couple of times, and have massively struggled. An ashtanga class last weekend was like trying to climb a mountain, and failing miserably, while my fitness drop was clearly shown in Monday's vinyasa flow class, where I had to take multiple pauses rather than flowing through as I prefer. It's not great for someone who wants to be a teacher, is it?
I guess these challenges are all set in our way to teach us how to overcome them. It's taught me that my old ways of blowing hot and cold, doing everything and then nothing, letting life overwhelm and upset me, aren't going to be sustainable going forward. I can't just sit at home in my bedroom, feeling sorry for myself, and putting exercise aside in a bid to simply think of nothing. It's also brought home the importance of a home practice to me. It would be the easiest thing in the world to get down onto my bedroom floor and partake in a short practice, and indeed if I want to get on the course I'm interested in, I strongly feel I need to develop a consistent home practice.
I keep saying this and yet I find it challenging. I'm the kind of person who gets back from work and is completely exhausted, who makes dinner there and then and then lies down and watches mounds of iPlayer. Once I'm out of my exercise routine, I find it challenging to get to classes, preferring instead to give into the tiredness, make excuses and sit around. Which is fine, because it often means you get to hang out with your family and have much-needed alone time, but it doesn't help my general fitness or my state of mind.
So what can I do? Well, I leave my job next week and I think I've been using that as an excuse for why I can't exercise - 'oh, I'm too stressed by work' 'oh, I'm busy jobhunting' and so on. I kept saying I was going to have a break after this role came to an end, and spend time realigning myself. But I've been offered a contract that, if all goes well, I will start in the next couple of weeks, and that will mean I have to keep my focus and sort myself out in a different part of the city, dealing with completely different challenges.
I also know I can do better with my food habits - I suffer from a few medical issues including IBS and reflux, and am also lactose-intolerant. For a long time I was very on top of things, avoiding the things I knew made me flare up, but in the past year I have grown lazy, and have started eating dairy without taking lactase pills, or foolhardily eating something with onion and garlic in. I'm not helping myself, I'm just screwing about with my health. And although I've not got really sick off anything (probably because I avoided pulses, my nemesis), I've had near-constant dodgy tummies, hot flushes, exhaustion and more. Grim. I don't want that. I want to feel fresh and good like I did last summer. I find it so frustrating that I let a relationship breakup start all this, and that I wasn't able to bring it under control sooner.
I just have to hope that moving forward, I can make things work, because I do care and I am passionate. I just need to care more about myself.