Meg Evans

I’m traveling on a road trip with my husband, leaving Wednesday evening, so I’ve scheduled this post in advance. I like the quote, and although (being honest) there isn’t much chance I’ll wake at dawn, it should be good enough to schedule the post for dawn, anyway.

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to encourage self-nurturing and to “give the planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.”

My next-door neighbor has been putting down mulch this week, and she offered to give me whatever was left over from the pile in her driveway. That might have been a roundabout comment on the less-than-perfect condition of my front yard. Although I took good care of the roses behind the house this year, and they look great, I can’t say the same of the neglected shrubs in front.

I spent some time cutting them back this evening, however, and they’re starting to look better—not perfect, but that is okay. It’s just what happens in real life.

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to encourage self-nurturing and to “give the planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.”

Instead of writing this post early in the day, I went out to get my hair done and left it for later. When I came home, I just sat down at my desk and got back to my work. Then I started chatting with my husband, and we went down to the river to do our rowing workout. By the time we got back to the house, it was past sunset, and I still had to take a shower and cook dinner, so this post didn’t get written until the end of the day.

When I thought about what to write, leaving things for later seemed like just the right topic!

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to encourage self-nurturing and to “give the planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.”

In addition to posting Nurturing Thursday entries on this blog, which I’ve done for the past 10 years, I now send weekly emails to my coworkers (with different Nurturing Thursday messages, though they are similar) to bring more peace and self-nurturing into the workplace after the pandemic. My workgroup had a tradition of motivational emails long before that, but those messages ended when the various contributors retired or changed jobs.

I’m taking vacation this afternoon and tomorrow, and I was just finishing up my work at 1 PM when I realized that I hadn’t sent a Nurturing Thursday email. I quickly composed and sent one, feeling relieved that it was still early enough in the day that my coworkers wouldn’t notice I almost forgot. Then I started thinking, what difference would it make anyway? We all forget things, or come close to forgetting, and the world still keeps on spinning regardless. No worries!

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to encourage self-nurturing and to “give the planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.”

This afternoon, with my husband away traveling until tomorrow, I felt unsettled in my quiet house. It was okay, though. I reminded myself that emotions come and go. I went down to the basement to do a rowing machine workout, which left me feeling better afterward.

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to encourage self-nurturing and to “give the planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.”

Continuing my line of thought from last week’s Nurturing Thursday post about how to balance other activities with a demanding exercise plan, in which I compared it to learning how to pace a workout on the rowing machine, the solution became obvious once I looked at it in those terms. My pacing on the machine improved when I had collected enough statistics on my workouts to know when I was going too hard. So, I need to take a similar approach to my activities overall, creating a spreadsheet to track what I actually do and compare it to the workout plan, to make sure I’m not overexerting myself.

Running low on energy is no fun, either during a workout or feeling run down more generally; but sometimes it’s part of learning how to do better.

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to encourage self-nurturing and to “give the planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.”

This week I’ve been contemplating how to balance other activities with my training plan for rowing, which my husband and I do together. It includes strenuous exercises crafted (more or less fiendishly) by two national-level rowers. They balance the hard workouts with some easy days and Sundays off, so it’s a reasonable plan, consistent with the current wisdom in exercise physiology. They are younger than our kids, and I suspect they think it’s an interesting challenge to see how much they can do with geezers like us.

My fitness has been much improved since we started doing these workouts three years ago. At first, it felt overwhelming because I hadn’t previously done such demanding workouts and did not have a good sense of how to pace myself. There would be days when I started too fast on the rowing machine, then all my energy suddenly drained away, and I struggled to finish. Now that I understand pacing better, that generally does not happen, and the exercises don’t feel as daunting.

I still find myself getting low on energy sometimes, though, after traveling or other events that are outside my usual routine. That also seems to be a pacing issue, in that the training plan takes up more of my energy, restricting what else I can do. I need to discover where my limits are, letting some things go and taking others more slowly, so that I can find the right balance.

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to encourage self-nurturing and to “give the planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.”