Get a life and stay fit? Difficult but do-able
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Jog Squad marathon runner Jon Bird discusses staying fit and juggling life, work and family all at the same time.
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I read somewhere once that you can only do three things in life really well at any one point in time. For me, that's my family, my fitness and work. That's basically it. So if I am aiming for balance, I do it by trying to maintain the focus on those three things.
I work in marketing. Like everybody these days, my job requires very long hours. And I don't know whether there is such a thing as a work/life balance, really. I think it's just a matter of fitting it all in.
Fitness has been a terrifically important part of my life. As you get older you realise the importance of fitness – perhaps you don't as much when you're young, in your 20s and early 30s and so on.
The most challenging thing about staying fit is finding the time and the motivation. Because when you become unfit, it takes a lot of will power to kind of get over that three-week hurdle and to get into fitness again. But once you've got the habit, you know it's not so hard and you can keep going.
When you're fit, you perform much better at work and at home. It's just better all around, we were meant to be fit. My wife is also a runner. She thinks I'm completely nuts, but she's reasonable enthusiastic. I've got two daughters, an 11 year old daughter and an eight year old. It's pretty hard to push your kids to do anything. I think all you can really do is to set a positive example and hopefully they see that as the norm.
I do a reasonable amount of running. They talk about ‘putting k's in the bank', so I run with a running club, the Northside Running Group (NRG). It's really good to run with friends, too, that's very motivating.
When you run a marathon, it's a mixture of fear and excitement. You get to the half way mark, 21km, and that's a really important milestone because you can judge how you're going in terms of your pace at that point in time. But they say the marathon really doesn't start till about the 30 or 32km mark. From that point on you really have to hang on until the end. And that's where the training that you've done comes into play and the energy maintenance – whether you've eaten the right things and you've taken the right supplements along the way.
There's a song that I listen to on my iPod sometimes when I'm running called ‘I won't back down'. I think the idea behind that is just to keep plugging away. In a lot of ways, that's what the marathon is all about. If you put one foot in front of the other for long enough, you get across the line.
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