Even though I did my family Thanksgiving workout during Fake Thanksgiving, that wasn’t going to stop me from still doing what feels like a tradition with working out on Thanksgiving. It’s nice that it fits in perfectly with what is now my normal workout week, so it didn’t feel like much of a change for me. But I’m still proud of completing 10 years of Thanksgiving Day workouts!
My first 3 workouts of the week were my normal workout time before work. I have been dealing with some extra stress due to a few different things happening in my life, so I haven’t been sleeping or eating well. That affected my workouts and I was having more moments of lightheadedness. I know this is something I deal with from some of the medications I take and having poor sleeping and eating habits makes it worse. I still struggle to force myself to eat when I’m not feeling like it because that’s the mindset I’ve had for so long. But when I skip dinner and then work out the next morning, it’s not a good combination. I am lucky that I can make that feeling go away quickly if I just stop what I’m doing and sit down to take some deep breaths. It’s not ideal, but it’s manageable. And when it’s due to something that is somewhat my fault, I’m glad that I don’t have to totally ruin what I can do in my workout that day.
On Thanksgiving Day, I allowed myself to sleep in a bit and do a later morning workout. It was still a morning class, but it was about 2 hours later than I’m used to. This is the class time I normally do when I’m able to sleep in due to a holiday or a day off of work. If I didn’t have my day job to log into in the morning, I probably would take a class at that time because it’s still early enough to get it done and have the rest of the day, but it allows me to get a little more sleep. The only negative with that class time is that I take my morning medications before going to work out, so I have a few side effects that I sometimes have to work around. It’s worse when I do a later class on a Monday since I do my injection on Mondays and that really affects me. But with my other medications, I have things like elevated heart rate and dropped blood sugar which can make my workout a little harder. But just like having lightheadedness, it’s something I’ve learned to work with and it’s manageable.
But the Thanksgiving Day workout was probably the toughest workout of the week. It was a 2 group class, which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s harder or easier. This time, there was a lot of going from cardio to rowing, so that was an added challenge. I also pushed myself a little too hard on the rower the first time I was on it because I didn’t know what other rowing I had coming up. I still think my rowing is getting stronger, but my last row of the workout was a lot worse than how I started off the block. I don’t believe in the idea that you have to work out in order to “earn” certain foods on holidays, but I do like how I feel when I work out before a celebration like that compared to not working out before. And my workout was early enough that I had some time to be lazy at home before I started cooking dinner.
As much as I would have loved to work out with my family on Thanksgiving Day, I think this workout would have been harder for them than the class we did a few weeks ago. So I think that Fake Thanksgiving was the better workout choice for us.
I’ve got 2 more holidays that I can do some workouts around, but I’m not sure yet if I’ll do a Christmas Eve workout. That’s a day that I usually don’t work out, so I might not go in. But I’ll find a way to make it work for me to work out on New Year’s Eve, even though that is normally a rest day too. That’s one of those traditions I’ve created around Orangetheory that I will go out of my way to make sure it continues.
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