Fit Friday: FUN

Happpppy Friday!! I have the great fortune to be done with classes by 11:15 on Friday, which is amazing in many ways because I can do whatever I want all day without feeling pressure to be productive. However, as I have mentioned in earlier posts, I am 99.9999% sure I have an undiagnosed case of ADD, and this limits by Friday chyll time considerably. I cannot sit and watch TV for longer than an hour, aimlessly wandering through Target eats up only about 35 minutes, and cleaning my room is a generally disastrous task that results in half of the room being OCD level clean while the other half bores me and remains messy. SO, I am left with a few other options. One of them is working out. While there's something that feels inherently wrong about working out on a Friday, I do feel obligated to get in a workout of some kind before the weekend commences. Enter, yoga.

As someone who spent most of my 13-18th years swimming competitively, I find any form of exercise that does not involve a coach barking at orders at me to be very difficult. I was so conditioned over the years to mindlessly exercise that once I retired from swimming, I felt lost in terms of what to do. I would run a mile and then become bored and stop, or try and swim laps and end up lazily doing handstands in the shallow end. The only time I felt really engaged in my workouts was when I would attend a spinning/yoga/pilates class and drift back in to the serenity of having someone tell me exactly how to exercise. However, this was not exactly a great lifelong plan. I needed to find a way to self motivate myself and find workouts that I loved. 

I tried a few different things: kayaking, paddle boarding, running, Zumba (HUGE mistake...most awkward hour of my life.) hiking, skiing, tennis, yoga. And while they were all fun in their own right (if you've never tried paddleboarding DO IT while it's still summer) I have found yoga to be the most intensely relaxing, soothing thing ever for days like Friday when you want to move your body but you also kinda don't. It settles your mind and body in a really amazing way and makes you feel super flexible. So go do some yoga! And then have a fantastic weekend.

Thursday Thought Process

Something I've realized after being a student for the past seventeen years (just counted that for the first time...on my fingers...) is that I have the attention span of a gnat when it comes to the end of the week. I don't mean to be self deprecating, because I have the ability to focus very passionately on a range of subjects including a friend's boyfriend's inability to text her back within the hour or, say, my senior seminar, which scares me more than sharks and commands my wide-eyed attention each week. However, when it comes to mundane end-of-week tasks such as my hour and fifteen minute morning class or deciding between hot or iced coffee (Went with iced, duh), I just start to lose steam by the time Thursday rolls around. On Mondays you can find me prancing around my room color coordinating outfits and picking out the perfect jewelry, but by Thursday, I consider it a GREAT success if I brush my teeth hair.

THUS, making sure I eat healthy after hump day is important, and planning ahead is ideal. Enter: the Thursday salad bowl. By the end of the week, groceries have dwindled a bit and most of the good stuff is gone (cheezits, Chobani, pepper jack...I'm looking at you). So you're faced with the remnants. However, don't fret! All these leftover ingredients are dying to hang out in your Thursday salad bowl. You can literally throw whatever you have left in a pan with some extra virgin olive oil, salt, pepper, and a few spices (I'm a big fan of fresh basil, a bit of garlic salt, lemon juice, and paprika). For this particular bowl, I only used my remaining mushrooms because my red peppers were frankly wilting, and that's gross. I chopped up some carrots, the last of my cherry tomatoes, and put it all over arugula. I opened up a can of tuna and put that on as well. While canned tuna is not exactly gourmet or fresh seafood, it is a good way to get some protein and tastes 10X more fresh without mayonnaise. I finished it off with some balsamic.

 While my ideal Thursday meal probably looks more like this:

I have neither the patience nor $$ by Thursday to create steak frites...for lunch. Lezbehonest, I never have the $$ for that. That's what parents weekend is for. And it's probably for the best, because the Thursday Salad Bowl is tasty, filling, and super easy. Also, don't be fooled by by running sneaker in the photo. My Thursday workout is a sad, bizarre looking walk-run that can barely be defined as exercise. I didn't have the energy to crop the picture.