Freelance and Fitness

I am in perennially bad shape. I blame a childhood that placed absolutely no importance on health. To be clear, I don’t blame my parents. Their main goal was to get us educated and assimilated. In this, they succeeded. But I throw a ball like the girliest girl. I only recently found out what a squeeze play was.

A few years ago, I decided to do something about this. I ate much better and started exercising. The exercise started as 10,000 steps a day and progressed to riding my bike 15 miles roundtrip to work. I ended up losing almost 50 pounds in the process.

Then we moved to Pittsburgh.

Since we moved here, I have been working at home. For most of that time, I had a real 9 to 5 job. A job with a dependable paycheck and the inherent disillusion that leads you to take six hours to do something that could be done in two. A reasonably normal schedule meant I could still keep an eye on my health. It was pretty nice.

But for the last year, I have been consulting/freelancing/contracting. In some ways, it has been much better. I work wherever I want, but I work all the time. Every minute of that time is billable. Despite several months of relative success (compared to the 9-5), I’m still worried that the spigot will run dry. This fear causes me to never say no to a project. And even more frightening, I hardly ever exercise.

Any time that I’m jogging around the neighborhood or riding my bike is time that I could be earning money. What this has really earned me is 20 odd pounds, the return of a snore and a general feeling that concrete portions of my life are crumbling. When I was healthiest, I was happiest. I am not there now. Something needs to change.

So I’m going to start where I started before. 10,000 steps, every day. Fitbit, keep me honest.

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  1. widepipe posted this