I realized it's been awhile since I've made a post, so I'll try to provide a recap of what's happened lately.
Most significantly, I have started a temporary job at Northwestern University. For those of you not familiar with the Chicago area, the main campus for Northwestern is in Evanston, a bit north of Chicago. It's not a far commute from downtown Chicago or thereabouts, but I live 8 or 9 miles west of the lake. It doesn't sound like that would make much of a difference, but it certainly does, with traffic. Unfortunately there is no direct route from the O'Hare area to Evanston, so I have to take a bus basically all the way to the lakefront and then catch a train up to Evanston. On a good day, the commute can take about an hour and a half. On a bad day, more like 2 hours.
My current schedule (which will likely change a bit soon) is 9 to 5. I have to leave my house by about 7 to make sure I'm not late for work. So I wake up at 5:30 or 6, depending on whether I'm taking a morning shower. I leave work around 5 (or 4:30 if I cut my hour lunch break down to a half hour) and get home around 6:30 or 7 (6 or 6:30 if I left at 4:30). So between getting ready, commuting, and actual time spent working, work consumes about 13 hours a day, on average. Add in 7 hours of sleep, and I'm left with 4 hours a day for personal things on weekdays.
All that rambling did have a point relevant to my running and exercising pursuits. With 4 hours a day, it has gotten more difficult to spend 5 days a week fitting in a 45-to-60-minute workout. I'm still doing a decent job, considering. I usually eat dinner as soon as I get home to get some energy for a workout, and then around 8 I usually squeeze in a run or some time on the stationary cycle, all while watching a favorite TV show. That's what happens on a good night. There are nights, of course, when I don't come straight home from work because I need to run some errands or want to maintain some sort of social life, and there is just no time left for a workout. I usually still squeeze in 2 to 4 workouts a week, and that's not bad for the circumstances. I just hope it ends up being enough, come half-marathon day. But I'm also hoping to have moved on to a higher-paying full-time position by then and have gotten an apartment much closer to where I work. For now, all I can do is keep trying to balance my new adult life.
