So as an HR Leader, I get to travel a great deal and almost as much as Marti, but I enjoy a much bigger land area in my roaming. What goes along with travel is eating out, and well, either choosing to get fat or finding a way to exercise in a hotel. Exercising in a hotel sounds easy – go to the gym. Right? No. Some hotels (yes, even in today's modern world) don't have gyms, and some of them aren't worth being in for 5 minutes let alone long enough to get a recommended daily dose of healthy sweat. That's the hotel I'm in this week – gym not worth using in a climate too cold for running outside.
Being the persistent soul I am, Self and I have a chat (we do that, it's weird, we know).
Terri: We need to work out.
Self: Yes, we do. The gym at this hotel sucks, though.
Terri: This hotel has stairs and hallways. Big spaces to walk. We have a pedometer on this new iPod, we can do 10,000 steps.
Self: We will look like a dork.
Terri: I said walk, not run.
Self: Ok…
Self and I strap on the Asics Gel Nymbus shoes we're breaking in for running, the Polar Heart Rate Monitor, and the pedometer and head out in the hotel. Looking like a hot-wired, hippy robot in fancy turquoise and silver sneakers, Self and I determined there are 5 stairwells and 5 unique hallways in this hotel. We've got space. 900 steps per self-defined lap and running on the stairs is an option, as no self-respecting, airline-potato business traveler or tourist uses those.
About half-way through lap three, we start chatting again.
Terri: I feel like a hamster in a Habitrail® – up the stair tube, across the third level tube to another tube, back across the second level tube. (Google Habitrail®… it's a bunch of tubes for rodents to crawl around in for exercise.)
Self: Yep, but at least we're not the stupid hamster in the wheel running for his life and going nowhere. We're choosing how we move rather than letting the situation limit us.
Terri: Isn't that the point of Marti's Blog on "How Do You Want to Go Out" (October, 2010)?
This is what self and I were doing. No matter what the circumstance, we were choosing how we wanted to go out, and really that's a big lesson. Every moment in life is a choice of "How Do You Want to Go Out" and sometimes it's straight down the tube outside the front door of the office and telling this job to take itself and shove it. Self and I chose to go out walking in the hotel, regardless of passing the same guy twice in the hall and looking all red-faced in public, because I would rather know myself as a person of principled self-care than as someone who gained weight by staying in her room for lack of a likeable alternative. Choosing how to go out does require one to keep moving, even if it's just hanging around in the Habitrail® until a better alternative presents itself.
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