Wednesday, November 14, 2012

16 Ways to Master Your Derby-Life Balance
 balance is not "equal"

This is the same as I've been saying about periodization; if you're stressing yourself out trying to fit four skating practices and four strength training workouts per week, let me help you out with that: don't. I know where I get ideas like that, I'm meeting my league practice requirements on the one hand—and by the way league practice requirements are not four practices per week, more like two and a half, but I've always done four and am apparently only programmed to raise the bar and not dispense extra credit— and then I'll stumble upon a running or weightlifting program on the other hand, and it'll be a four day a week program, and my mind will automatically edit out that whatever program this is wasn't written for somebody who's already skating four times a week, and I'll spend an afternoon trying to put eight pegs into four holes. Which is, you know, stupid.

13. Balance Is Not “Equal”


“Personally, I’m not happy if I’m evenly dividing my time between work and other things. I really enjoy what I do, to the point that I get bored with a lot of hobbies. I focus on making sure that I’m doing well on a personal level: if I’m feeling stressed out, I’ll take a step back; if I feel like I’m not getting enough work done, I’m cool with investing more time.” -Thursday Bram, Hyper Modern Consulting

Right-o! I have probably said enough things about this in a training context, now imagine all those things applied to a life context. To paint it in the broadest strokes, maybe you're spending the greater part of yourself doing derby and derby things with derby friends, and you know what, that's okay. There's no rule that says you have to put four derby pegs and four non-derby pegs into eight holes!

Either this is obvious or it's an epiphany to you. Which is the larger point of this, what standards are you trying to meet and are some of them maybe stupid? Who made them? Was it you? Was it the mean voice in your head? Because you need to tell that voice to shut up and that that's not how it is.

Truthfully, I do not have a lot of non-derby pegs. Mainly I have the sweetie man who is amazingly supportive of the derby pegs and takes away a non-derby peg now and again to free up another hole. Being gratefully aware of this and also thinking that he's pretty cute makes it easy enough to choose TV nights with him over all of the other things, though.

You may not have weeded out your peg collection as ruthlessly as mine, partly it was done for me—no family—and partly it's my way; but it doesn't have to be your way. So now you have to figure out sanely how to fit them all in and hint, eight pegs in four holes is not sane. Just remember that everything doesn't have to be equal, you're allowed and furthermore it's healthy for you to be aware of what's more important to you. And further even more if you're trying to make closely important things equalish, you have that fourth dimension, time, to play with.