Competing Schedules (the answer to "How do you find time?")

Every mother who works full time and trains is often asked, “How do you find the time?” Since this runner is also a BCBA, I will give you the behavior analytic answer: competing schedules of reinforcement. In other words: prioritizing, organizing, and streamlining to fit it all in.

In daily life, we do the things that maximize reinforcement and avoid punishment. It’s not as simple as a laboratory arrangement with a rat pressing the lever that delivers food while avoiding the lever that delivers electric shock, but it’s the same principle. There are always countless things going on in our lives, and we make choices based on what brings us pleasure (e.g., hugging our loved ones, eating a favorite food, petting our cat), what we have to do to continue in life based on our higher level rule-governed behavior (e.g., working to make money to support our families and to avoid losing our home, sending the kids to school to learn and to avoid truancy, etc.), and what we have to do in the moment to avoid aversive situations (e.g., turn the stove off after cooking breakfast, stop the child from taunting the cat). There isn’t a simple way to describe how this all works for me or for any one person, but there are many concurrent schedules or reinforcement and punishment operating all of the time in our lives, and we behave accordingly.

I find time to train because it is very reinforcing to me. I arrange my daily schedule and life in a manner that is conducive to working, spending time with my family, meeting my other obligations (the boring stuff like paying bills, doing my laundry, cleaning my house, getting my oil changed), and training, which is my leisure time. For me, this means I wake up between 4:30-5:00 a.m. during the week to complete my workouts before I leave my house for work around 7:40 a.m. Is getting up at that time always easy? Absolutely not. But not only is running reinforcing, missing a workout is aversive. My behavior matches that – I get up out of my warm bed and get the workout in, and am always better for it.

I am fortunate to have a supportive husband who makes this process easier simply by staying in our warm bed and therefore home with our daughter while I’m exercising. Once, when he was out of state during the week (and on some weekends) for 6 weeks, I learned how much harder it is without him. But I still worked out daily, thanks to lunch break runs, our home workout room, repeated back-and-forths on the road right in front of our house, and the YMCA Kids Zone and dirt half mile loop (I have run 32 laps in a row on that puppy).

I also don’t do some of the things that others enjoy, because training is more valuable to me. I don’t watch television or movies (except during indoor workouts), I don’t make extravagant home-cooked meals, I don’t do anything featured on Pintrest, I’m not big on shopping. I have nothing against those things, they just aren’t priorities for me. No one can do it all, and no one should try to. But we all should do the best we can at our most important jobs (for me that is being a Christian, wife, mother, and BCBA), and have some “me” activities we enjoy that make us better at the important jobs (for me that is running competitively!). At the end of the day, I’m just a regular person responding to her environment, just like everyone else.

This is how we do cold weather race spectating!

My inspiration

Before the Bass Pro Marathon 11/1/15