A fine balance

The past month has been all about balancing for me. I am lucky in that I do two things that I absolutely love: parkour and physical anthropology. They both give me great benefits, but I also have a sense of responsibility towards both, which sometimes causes tension. Two weeks ago, I flew to Bogotá for a parkour performance (you can see the video here). The show was great, and it was awesome to see a new country, to interact with some very friendly locals, and train with Frosti, Ryan and Adrian. I didn’t get to stay to play in the city, though, because I had to teach three phys. anth. classes back here in DC, and then, less than 24 hours later, get on a plane to South Africa. I had been invited some months ago to collect calculus samples from some early human ancestors, which was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up! I’m back home now, profoundly grateful that I was able to be involved in both of these projects, but also rather tired. Luckily, both work and parkour are going back to “normal” and I’ll keep working at finding that equal balance between them.

Making Time

In February I started working a full time job (8am to 5pm) after having worked "part time" in a couple of different jobs (driving a delivery van in DC, teaching Martial arts, office work) for two years. I immediately noticed that with the time at work itself plus the communte time (about 30 minutes one way), I was starting to find less and less time to train with others. I would get off work and have to run some errands, or I would head home and make dinner and spend time with my wife, or I would volunteer to teach an hour or so of martial arts, and before I knew it I had to hit the hey or I'd hate myself in the morning.

With the sudden cut in training, I decided that I had to 'make time' for myself to work on my parkour and martial arts training. So far I have been using my unpaid lunch hour to go out and train, as I am lucky enough to work in a building that has showering facilities. This however only leaves me maybe 35 or 40 minutes to train, as changing and showering and such take up the other 20 or so minutes. This really effects the way I train, as I used to take my time warming up, and then drill something for a while with no particular rush. Now I have to get right to work and try to squeeze as much into my weekly sessions as possible. Quite often I found myself finishing a warmup and workout and not getting any time in to train specific skills.

So the question becomes, what can I cut out next? Starting next week, I'll likely be getting up significantly earlier and going to train before work. Propapby going to try to get teh workout/conditioning done in teh morning, and then just train skills at lunch. We'll see how well and how long this lasts.

What sort of things do you do to 'make time' for yourself and your training?