Quick-Tip Tuesday:- Busy Lifestyle and lack of time

Are you a busy person who struggles to fit running into your day? Do you have other commitments that compete for your time and stop you from meeting your running (or other) goals?

Our new weekly section, "Quick-Tip Tuesday", will look at a common running problem (often with a real-life example) and offer some practical solutions that should be helpful to others in that situation.

Week 1: Neil Macey (Me). Problem: busy lifestyle and lack of time.

The problem:
Like many people living in the modern world I have many competing demands for my time and even with the best will in the world and plenty of motivation it can be a struggle to maintain a work life balance and fit in those runs. Does this sound like you? You are not alone!

A recent pole found that the average Londoner works 38.4 hours a week although that rises to 48.2 hours for teachers like me with 20% of us workig over 60 hours per week! As a nation we are probably working too much. So how can we "fit in" those much need extras in our lives that we don't want to miss out on?

My solution:

There is one simple step that I took a long time ago that has resolved this issue for me and I hope it can be of help to you: routine.

Put simply I no longer have to "fit" running into my life...it is a part of my daily routine just as much as brushing my teeth or having a shower (except the occasional day off running isn't disgusting!). Being a teacher I have a Monday- Friday job in a fixed location so I know I'm going to be making the same journey every day. Each day when I leave work I leave my smart clothes and work shoes in school and get changed into my running clothes. This is my routine, I do it everyday. Since I am wearing my running clothes I might as well run home, right? It's better than waiting for the bus! And I have to run past my gym on my way home...so I might as well pop-in, right? I'm wearing the right clothes anyway. What I have done is removed the barriers that would otherwise have stopped me.

The best result though comes the next morning...my work clothes are still in school so what do I do? I take a clean set of running clothes and I run to school! At home time I've got all I need and the cycle repeats. All I need to do then is bring home 5 dirty work shirts on a Friday and my little 1.5 mile each way run has turned into 15 miles (1.5 mile there, 1.5 miles back, 5 days a week). And I have saved myself £15 in bus fares and arrived at work in a good mood each day.

The results:

Here is a two week period from my strava account. This is a typical week for me in which I wasn't training for a particular event. Each dotted line is a day of the week and each circle represents a run. You can see straight away that every weekday starts with a 2.8 ish mile circle. That is my commute to workand home again and makes up a significant part of my total weekly milage and then I just need a few longer runs at the weekend and some harder training drills a few evenings a week.

Over to you:

How do you fit running into your life? Do you have any strategies to share? Any useful hints or tips? Do you need any advice? Let us know in the comments below!