Don’t give up the running, yoga, walking

By Fiona Boyd |  Email This Post

Yesterday I was at the doctor’s for my 4 year old’s immunizations and her rather wonderful doctor Andrew and I had a bit of a chat about running. He’s out there running the same route as me along the bayside foreshore of Melbourne most days. I see him from time-to-time and we wave to each other and cheer each other on.

Colette, our 4 year old, has Down Syndrome and we didn’t find out this most important fact until she was nearly five months old. Colette started having seizures straight after I took her for her first round of immunizations, and for many months we had a fairly stressful time as we both found out that her seizures were noted in a small number of Down Syndrome children around the world each year and needed to be sorted and fast – and the other big shock was when her genetic tests came back and confirmed the neurologist’s suspicion that she had Down Syndrome.

I remember we found Andrew as our family doctor at this time, and I would mention my ability to get out and run was non-existent as my world changed and was being rocked around me, and he would subtly mention to ‘keep up the running’.

For the past six months, bar a much needed one week break with David at Hayman Island, I have very intensely been working on a project with another party that required an enormous amount of effort to get up and running and which was yielding no signs at all of any positive results. This was despite David and my huge labour on it and despite spending plenty of dollars on it. With the stress and anxiety around wanting to make this venture fly, I stopped running.

And Andrew noticed.

All the extra effort, hiring people to help, getting David onto the task of creating a totally new content management system, member management system and transactional system ( a huge task and one he solved with an incredibly good back end), creating new content, getting people we knew with great skills involved, shelling out our definition of a fortune in Google adwords – none of this actually mattered a jot. The results didn’t shift interest. People came to the site initially, but they didn’t stay and they didn’t buy anything. In time, they just didn’t come.

Don't give up what's good for you - keep running!

Andrew asked me why I hadn’t been running at the appointment and the light bulb went on. Working extra hard, doing more, angsting about it, pushing hard doesn’t get results if they’re not there to be had.

It’s been eight weeks since I had been running and skipping my time out on my runs had done nothing but make me feel fatter, less energetic, less happy and to actually put on a few kilos around the middle. Nothing huge, but enough to tell me that I’m on the wrong path.

I know I’ve had discussions with the hardest working (after David) entrepreneur I know, Scott Kilmartin from Haul that the one thing as a founder, business owner, entrepreneur you should try not do is give up whatever exercise you do. I believe we all do it, but the lesson in here for me is that giving up on whatever’s good for you doesn’t make you go better, and it doesn’t get the results you seek.

Before the doctor’s appointment yesterday I went for my first run in eight weeks and it made all the difference to how I felt physically and mentally.

It also made it clear to me that I had some big decisions to take.

I’m off for another run this afternoon and hope I can get my fitness back. I had been on track in April to run the Melbourne Marathon in October, but I will have to work really hard just to even be able to complete the half-marathon now. That was one of the goals I wrote down in my New Year plan.

So after a huge sideways lurch, I have a couple of pieces of advice to offer myself for the future. The second I’ll share with you in a day or so, but the first is ‘never, ever give up your running, yoga, walking’ or whatever it is that you do to keep fit and stay well. The hour you do this every day is the best hour you can spend on yourself and you should never let yours or other people’s expectations or business pressures, crowd it out.

Photo: aarmono

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