Freelance life is tough on the body

Surprise! Like errant shampoo in your suitcase, I’m slowly emerging from my bottle of winter hibernation. My last proper run was the YMCA Dallas Turkey Trot 8 mile, but I finally “ran” a bit on the Katy a few days ago. Go me!

My return to running isn’t really what’s exciting me. I got a 24 Hour Fitness membership at the downtown Dallas location a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been a blast. Lots of spinning classes that have delivered an expected and much needed butt-kicking. Weights, abs class, indoor track, yoga and a boot camp class that took me four days to recover from. It’s been great to simply move again.

But there’s a question I can’t ignore any longer, for my own good. Why am I prone to mega-breaks from working out and running? I think periodic breaks — two weeks, a month — are fine and even beneficial. But this was an especially long one, and not my first. I’ve tried to analyze it, with hopes of finding solutions and staying on track.

If I don’t have an indoor facility, winter always deals me a blow. I’m a cold-weather wiener and absolutely HATE running in anything but 65-degree air or hotter. Winter races are different, because race day is always different from shivering in the cold by my lonesome without the excitement, t-shirt and free banana to motivate me.

I also suspect the freelance life of having an influence. I’ve been working freelance since July. The one aspect of my chosen career course that makes me want to jump out of a window is the lack of steady, pre-packaged structure a full-time job often provides. Irony is, I don’t even like steady, pre-packaged structure; it’s one of the reasons I left it for freelance. But its one virtue is that it allows workers to dig a personal groove, which then keeps them on track without much trying. In freelance, you can knock yourself out crafting a groove out of a present set of clients and projects all you want. But when the set changes (and it does, often), you also have to change your groove. Or lose it. The groove-turnover can be like the black-smoke monster in Lost, grabbing me by the ankle and flinging me around until I lose my orientation and think it’s 1996. I sometimes feel the juggling act holding me hostage. I allow it to turn me into a groove-less mess, holding me down in my jammy-jams on the couch underneath my husband’s Longhorns blanket with my laptop at 2 p.m., trying to be a professional. It doesn’t take much to knock my running life off track anyway, but what I didn’t see coming was the flexible, home-based work life I chose becoming the biggest saboteur of all. And if I’m to find a solution, I have to face that the saboteur is actually me.

One last bit that’s bothered me. For years now I’ve taken a particular medication, which happens to have a pleasant, unrelated side effect of boosting my metabolism. Until a few months ago I’d taken it for, mmm, maybe six, seven years at a dosage that’s afforded me easy skinniness, to the point I’d forgotten the perk doesn’t actually belong to me. (I reiterate: The medication was not prescribed FOR me to obtain easy skinniness. That’s a common, unrelated side effect). My chosen freelance work life means an insurance situation that limiyd my access to this medication, along with most other things medical. So since July, I’ve wavered between no medication at all and, now, a small fraction of the dosage I used to take. One of the results of this has been a return to my natural, 34-year-old woman’s metabolism, and a slight weight gain. Not enough to send me to bariatric surgery, but enough to make my clothing feel like hungry boa constrictors. I’m still praying that the slow-down will even out eventually. We’ll see if that’s the case.

Meanwhile. I’m working out as much as possible and trying to alter my diet a bit (which, for me, is the much more difficult of the two). Simply trying to stay on track.