My Love-Hate Relationship With Routines

At social events and parties, especially when I was younger, I used to stay a long time or leave around the same time as everyone else, and really live in the moment to develop close bonds and relationships with my friends. In the most recent work happy hours or parties I’ve been to, however, I have been one of the first to leave. Sometimes, my friends will stay at the restaurant or party hours after I do, and I feel like I sometimes leave rudely early

Other people I work with have good excuses: their kids. However, my only excuse is that I have to do more work. Sometimes, my friends will stay at the restaurant or party hours after I do. I need to go home and do more readings as a law student or long-term projects at work. I might need to go on a run if I hadn’t done so during the day. I have to run every day, or at least every other day. I also need to get a certain amount of work done or else I feel like I’ll lose my rhythm. The other day, my wife and I were the first to leave a family friend’s holiday party we were invited to because we had to finish some work at school. We have canceled or postponed trips to see friends or go out of town by sheer virtue of being too busy.

I sometimes wonder whether I am prioritizing my career and routines over my relationships.

With trying to take the next step as a long-distance runner right now and it’s more about the effort than the final outcome. It’s really hard to predict how what I’m working on now will necessarily have an impact in three months’ time, but I just have to trust that routines now increase the probability of better fitness later.

Five years ago, I used to think I needed only a good day and then everything could click and become better. But I now know that this takes a lot of time and the monotonous routines eventually pay off. There are times when it feels like things click, but it comes with tens if not hundreds of moments where it feels like you’re beating your head against the wall and that the long-term project you’re working on will never get done.

My current routine brings me back to my sophomore year of college when I spent almost three months barely able to run at all. I had some significant muscle balances in my glutes that caused severe right hip pain. It was frustrating because I had run 70 miles a week the summer before and was in terrific shape, ready to make a huge jump, only for this injury to not only set me back but make me wonder whether I could run again for periods of time.

Only through daily rehab and stretching that seemed to take hours, hours of aqua jogging in the pool, and sessions on a bike or elliptical was I not only able to come back, but come back better. When I came back from injury, I eventually ran a 27-second personal best in a year that could have just been labeled the “injury year.”

But I would be lying if I said I was composed and kept a level head the whole time. I was angry at times when my teammates were all going to meets and running personal bests and all I could do was cheer on the sidelines and help my coach with administrative paperwork. It is only looking back that I can appreciate that the rehab paid off.

My problem when I was younger was always being erratic and inconsistent. I would have very good days, but on days I was not feeling it or days I felt in a rut, I would not engage as fully. I always needed to feel great to participate. I always needed to feel like it was going well, and as such, I struggled to persist and keep going when things were not going well. It has started to be critical for me to keep working at long-term goals every day, whether it has been being a marathon runner, maintaining a reading habit, working at improving my foreign language skills, or more. As I’ve learned the lesson of long-term consistency, I try to also preach it to students who are excellent students who may struggle with inconsistent attendance.

Since I’m no longer an erratic and inconsistent person, I have been getting into fitness goals beyond being a marathon runner of late, including starting a daily pull-up journey as soon as I can set up an apparatus in the house. I like to think building in these daily routines is a sign of other life successes other than that sole event. But that is not always true. Running every day fatigues me and takes up a lot of time. That is not to say I don’t have days where I just don’t have time and just am not feeling it — I can take one day off, but not two days off from running or I know I will build too much rust.

In law school, I’m getting past a storm right now where I had a week of two law school papers due and three exams to take in a five day span. I had a law school exam that was a 24-hour take-home exam, where I spent almost the entire day obsessing over every single detail. I have worked very hard on all these exams and papers and can honestly say I gave them my all. Of course, I won’t know how I do until I actually take these tests. That storm is now over, but there will be many storms to come.

I had all these moments where I was just pressing forward with adrenaline. Now, with all of them over, I’m not quite sure what to do with myself.

It remains that I tend not to give myself much time to rest or stop, but obviously I’m the person who structured my schedule this way. I am in a year where I am transitioning from being a teacher to an attorney, and this season of change comes with more than just material changes. First, one of the jobs I’m applying for is in the Marines Judge Advocate General, which is known better by its shorthand, Marine JAG. One part of the journey I will have to get ready for is the Marines Physical Fitness Test, where the best candidates, as I have been told, can run three miles in 18 minutes, do 23 pull-ups, and plank for three minutes and 45 seconds. I am trying to prepare myself for this test among other parts of being a military lawyer. There’s no guarantee that this is what I’ll become once I graduate from law school, but I want to keep the possibilities open and prepare.

My days have been the daily grind of marriage, work, school, and everything else. So much of my life lately hasn’t included big, drastic changes, but small, incremental improvements, most of which feel relatively insignificant. I often start long-term projects with five to ten-minute work increments, feeling like I’m conjuring something out of nothing. That’s what the pushups felt like, and it’s what the start of many papers and study sessions have also felt like.

I’m the type of person, however, who now clings to routines. It makes life more predictable, but it also makes me feel like long-term progress is being made.

But I struggle when those routines are not there. I struggle on weekends or vacations. I struggle to relish the moment, when I am running a route I know I never will run again or am seeing a sight I will never see again. It frustrates my wife, for sure, but I struggle on vacations knowing that we are spending a lot of money but not saving anything.

This is a period of time I have a break from law school, and I have all this free time all of a sudden that I don’t know what to do with. Sometimes, I am so focused on the grind that I struggle to be engaged when hanging out with friends or spending time with my wife. I’m sure transitioning careers will also be a struggle. I can’t count how many vacations I’ve been on where I advocated for staying in the hotel and not going anywhere for long periods of time. One time, on a summer study abroad in Italy, all my classmates decided to go to a famous coastal town one weekend. I decided to stay in the dorm — I didn’t go because I wanted to save money.

I now intellectually know but struggle to accept that routines are an essential part of the process, but not the end all be all of most important things. Time keeps passing, and we all keep getting older. I know, once in a while, that zooming out and appreciating the moments that will never come again will be the next transformative change.

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This post was previously published on The Narrative Arc.

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