Not My Usual Thanksgiving Week Workouts (or Trying To Keep The Tradition Going)

This post is mainly going to be about my Thanksgiving workout. But I did have my 4 workouts this past week. I changed up my schedule a bit to work around Thanksgiving, but I still got the 4 in. I’m still dealing with vertigo a bit and have to modify things, but I’m noticing that it is getting easier each workout.

I’m still trying to push myself so that I can start doing outdoor workouts soon, but I’m also starting to wonder if I should do them. I know they are doing everything they can to keep things safe, but cases are increasing and I have to keep that in mind. Also, things are starting to lock down here again, so I’m not sure if that means outdoor workouts will have to close. Right now, it seems like they can stay open. So keeping the idea of going to an outdoor workout as a goal is a good one. Even if I don’t end up doing one for a while, it still will help me push myself.

But my 3 non-Thanksgiving workouts this past week were pretty normal for me. Or at least as normal as things have been lately. So that’s good.

And my workout on Thanksgiving Day was the one that was special.

Ever since I started at Orangetheory, my family has had a new tradition to do an OTF workout on Thanksgiving morning. It’s not always the same members of my family at each workout, but we always have a few of us there. This year, when the pandemic started, I was hoping that we would still be able to continue the tradition. But as time went on, I knew that there was no way that we would be together for Thanksgiving. So we wouldn’t have our workout as a family.

But I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I was still determined to do something connected to our tradition. I knew that I would be doing a workout on Thanksgiving Day on my own. My plan was to do the OTF At Home workout like I normally do. But I tried to see if there was another option that maybe would allow my family to work out together. But because we all had very different schedules, coordinating a workout wasn’t possible. So I asked everyone in my family to send me photos of their workout that day and I would do something with it.

Some of us did video workouts, some went skiing, some did chores that doubled as cardio, and some just made sure they got out and moving. I love the photos I got from everyone. And an added bonus to us doing workouts on our own was that 2 dogs got to be in the photos too! Tucker was “helping” my mom shovel snow and Graham decided to be a part of my Aunt Cindy’s video workout.

It’s not what our post-workout photo usually looks like, but I think it’s perfect to represent what our 2020 Thanksgiving workouts were like. We weren’t together, but we were still keeping a tradition alive on our own. And of course, I had to add this photo to the collage with all of our workouts.

If nothing else, we will never forget what this year was like for us. It will be the one oddball photo in the collage for as long as we are able to keep this tradition going. And while I know I would have preferred for us all to be together and to have a photo that fits in with the others, it still makes me happy that we didn’t give up on something that we love to do and we have something to represent this year.

I hope that by next year, it will be safe for us to be together. I missed being with my family this year (more on that later this week). I missed our traditional workout. I’m glad we had something, but it’s not the same as working out as a family. Just like how working out at home isn’t like being at the studio in class. I missed how much fun we have at our family workout. I missed the competitiveness between me and my dad (it seems to mainly be between us). I missed feeling like we did something special together. But as I’ve said several times about things this year, we had to stay apart and stay safe this year so we can be together for so many more years in the future.

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