Finding Time to Train

There are some other threads about this farther down the list with lots of good advice. I think the best tips involve incorporating other parts of your life (friends, kids, etc.) with your workout schedule so you can get more out of it. It depends a lot on your individual situation.

And wow, night school, good for you!

What works for me is I train as much as I really can.
We all have 24hrs in a day to do what we choose.
Besides, we will all get enough sleep when we're dead.......

When I am thinking about slacking off I often think about that person that is somewhere else training - harder, longer and faster than me.

How do you feel about training in the am, before work? Get organized. Plan your meals. Hire a babysitter if you have kids. Make it a priority and put it on your calendar. Enlist a friend to workout with you.

And yes, there are a few threads about this - look back - there are lots of tips! :-)

I understand how this goes. I have a very busy schedule (leave for work at 5:30 AM - get home at 8 PM), and a family (wife and 4 kids); finding time to train seemed overwhelming at the start. I finally decided to do it when my family was asleep. Nights during the week, and early morning on the weekends. If you can live on less sleep, this seems to work fairly well.

Bill

With the suggestion about the significant other, I have found an awesome solution. My girlfriend likes to run and bike. However, just not with me. So I offered her this. I plan on training for a 1/2 IM this summer, so on my long runs, she can grab a bike and ride along with as I run. It's great having the company, and plus it's fun to talk while you run. It passes the time faster. Plus, with someone there, the pace tends to get pushed a little more. I have noticed this when my mother goes with me. Good times. Good luck with all your ventures.

Cory

I agree with LJSChicago,
I get enough sleep about every other week--most nights I'll allow myself about 6.5-7 hours max. Getting up early is very big with me because often I know that I won't have time once my day starts to train at all. Such is the dilemma with being a student. I guess you just have to make it a priority and make time for it. Since running requires the shortest amount of time for me, I usually try to do running on days when I don't have two hours, or even a full hour sometimes, to train. I reserve biking and swimming for longer periods, but I can also squeeze swimming in a good 30 minutes if that's all I have.
hope this helps!

The actual answer for me has been to have the kids grow up and go off to college. The approximately 10,000 hours per week that they required is now freed up. But that's not very helpful as advice, since kids only grow up at the rate they grow up -and who wants it to go faster anyway???? And even so.... there just ARE days when real life takes over.

Ideas that might be helpful:

Lay out your workout clothes before you go to bed. If something is hard to find in the dark at 5:30 in the morning, snuggling in the covers is going to look way better than getting up to go running.

Make sure your bike-bag or backpack or whatever you use is loaded up with your biking snacks so you can stay on the road as long as you need to without starvation becoming an issue. Items in mine: a power bar, an apple, my cell phone, $5, ID -and my water bottle but that's not in the backpack.

Buy one of those programmable coffee pots that will start the coffee while you're still in bed. This thing has saved my life.

Squeeze a workout into your lunch hour. I do something over that hour, and then just eat at my desk as I'm doing something else.

Your crockpot is your friend. Throw dinner in there before you leave for work, and you'll magically have the 30 or 45 minutes that dinner prep would have taken, and you can sneak in a bike ride or some yoga or something.

I hope these ideas help, and I'll be anxiously looking for new tricks. I keep trying to convince my husband that we need to hire someone to clean our house, and then we'd have more time to train. So far... no luck.

Andrea