THE biggest obstacle to running among workers holding regular hours is the seeming lack of time for the sport.
“I want to run to stay fit but I’m too busy with work. I barely even have time for my family,” an acquaintance told me a couple of months ago when our conversation inevitably turned to the fastest growing sport in the country.
GO OUT THE DOOR AND RUN! “Consistency requires discipline,” Bob Glover and Shelly–Lynn Florence Glover say in The Competitive Runner’s Handbook, “Force yourself out the door.” (FROM THE FLICKR ACCOUNT OF INDUSTRY IS VIRTUE)Bob Glover and Shelly–Lynn Florence Glover have an emphatic advice in The Competitive Runner’s Handbook, “Consistency requires discipline. Force yourself out the door.”
Dr. Raymund “Reel Runner” Bontol is more blunt, “MAKE TIME!”
Cebu Maternity Hospital obstetrics resident Dr. Cecillie Milan goes on a 24-hour duty every three days.
Yet she makes it a point to run at least an hour three times a week.
She ran 21 kilometers in The Great Lapu-Lapu Run and in the Mandaue City race earlier this month before reporting for 24-hour hospital duty.
Dr. Milan says running helps her deal with work stress and at the same time “shed a few pounds each week so I’m not complaining.”
“Plus, it’s a good way to show our patients that we do practice what we preach. We’re setting good examples to our patients to adopt a healthy lifestyle,” she said in an interview.
Teletech Holdings, Inc. language trainer Jareliese Prescillas Mauro also makes it a point to make time for running.
But, she admitted, she used to think the sport was boring.
“But I figured that I was just hanging out with couch potatoes way too long,” she said.
Now, Mauro is a regular runner in the weekly Friday night run from the Sun.Star Cebu office to the Banilad Town Center and IT Park.
Mauro said running, which never made it in her life’s initial to-do-list, has made her a better employee.
Conventional wisdom has it that it takes only 21 days or three weeks to start a habit.
Three weeks, I kept telling myself in the first few days when all the cells of my body screamed for me to stop running and return to smoking cigarettes, and I’ll be a Zen master at running.
Three weeks later, I still wasn’t a Zen master but I found running tolerable.
A year later, and I now share Dr. Milan’s sentiment, “I can’t imagine life without running.”
It’s easy to feel that you have better things to do than run. Work demands time. The family needs your time.
But Dr. Bontol is right. MAKE TIME.
It’s the best investment for your physical well-being.
New York City Marathon founder Fred Lebow is also right. He said, “When you run in the morning, you gain time in a sense. It’s like stretching 24 hours into 25. You may need to sleep less and get up earlier, but if you can get by that, running early seems to expand the day.”