Thrilling Dirty-Tub Drama

I’m never going to win an award for world’s best housekeeper, but every so often my Type-A personality looks around my dirty house and says “I’m going to conquer this mess”. Then I spend a day not cleaning, but coming up with a battle-plan. I meticulously itemize every area in the house that needs to be clean and assign it to a schedule. The last time I did this I scheduled the bathroom cleanup on Tuesdays.

The first week it worked like a charm. The second week, not so much. I didn’t consider the fact that on Tuesdays I work a full eight-hour day, come home to eat, and then run out for three hours to work at one of my part-time jobs. By the time I get home I am tired and sweaty and the last thing I want to do is clean my bathroom. So the second Tuesday I got home and said “Eff this, I’m not cleaning my bathroom”. Not the type to give up completely, I tried half-heartedly to stick to my “perfect” schedule for another few weeks, but eventually the bathroom got repeatedly neglected and my tub built up a nice layer of grime.

My Genius Solution

If you stick with me here on the blog you’ll see that I push “rest, recovery, and stress management” like it’s the new crack. My bathtub is critical for my own personal rest, recovery, and stress management. A hot bath before bed does all kinds of great circulatory things for my muscles, gives me some quiet de-stress time, and also primes my body for a great sleep. I freaking LOVE a hot bath before bed, but I can’t enjoy one in a filthy tub.

Eventually I had to accept that I was not a domestic goddess and that Tuesdays were not good days to clean my bathroom. So here’s what I did: I stopped fussing over the big-picture, and just focused on having a clean tub. To achieve this I came up with a novel idea: take a scrub-pad into the shower with me. Seriously. When I shower I grab a little SOS scouring pad from a box under my bathroom sink. When I’m done cleaning my beautiful self I just bend down and scrub the tub, and all the grit rinses away. It’s so clever I should win an award.

How to Clean Your Tub

I bet you’re expecting a dry and informative step-by-step on cleaning your tub now, but you are going to be disappointed. This whole story, though true, was just a metaphor for your own lifestyle habits. I’m talking to all you ladies who have done the on-a-program/off-a-program dance again and again. You pick the perfect program, plan a week’s worth of perfect meals, coordinate the perfect outfit, and then you fail (perfectly). That’s because PERFECT IS THE ENEMY OF GOOD!

The 2 Keys to a Clean Tub Success

Here’s the gold at the end of the rainbow ladies. Apply this formula to your workouts, your sleep, your eating. Use this on whatever your own personal “dirty tub” is.

1. Focus on the most important thing. Instead of being obsessed with getting it all right you have to chip away all the extraneous bits and find the core of what you want to achieve. For me it was a clean tub. Not a clean house, not even a clean bathroom, just the tub. You probably don’t want to see a picture of my toilet as proof, just believe me when I tell you my tub is the most sanitary fixture in my house.

2. Make the plan work for you. The “perfect” time to work out is not first thing in the morning, the “perfect” workout is not a formulaic mix of strength and cardio at the “perfect” heart rate. The “perfect” meal doesn’t require you to calculate macronutrient ratios down to the decimal point. The PERFECT PLAN IS THE ONE THAT IS MOST CONVENIENT FOR YOU! For me that means working out at my lunch break, eating the same boring breakfast every morning, and not beating myself up for taking an extra rest day. If you aren’t sticking with it, find a new it.

What is Your Dirty Tub?

Confession is good for the soul, so cough it up. Do you have a “dirty tub” and what is it? Are you focused on the tub or the whole bathroom? Can you remember a time when your dirty tub was always shiny and clean? Can you identify the WHY and HOW it worked for you then? Share your answers in the comments.

Self sufficient is the best way I can sum up what a modern amazon should live. I means that you are smart enough, strong enough, and skilled enough to deal with whatever life throws at you. My shtick here is mostly going to be about strong, as in physically strong. I’ll talk about picking up large heavy objects and eating to fuel the effort involved in picking up large heavy objects. Sometimes I may go off on a tangent though, and talk about the evils of debt or how to raise your youngins’. Please bear with me, it’s usually only temporary.

There has been a big swinging pendulum in the world of women in the last century, and I think we’re still coming to terms with it. Though we’ve cast off the “shackles” of our homemaker grandmothers we are still very much told or shown what a woman should be. Not a person, a woman. There are some things that the modern world is telling us women that just don’t make sense. Imagine you are an amazon warrior, and you are suddenly transported right here, right now. How would you view some of the things that women do, or don’t do?

For example; why is it that it’s appropriate for a woman to enjoy running, or spin class, or yoga, but the weight room is still a male-dominated zone? Why is the barbecue so often a man’s cooking tool? Why are we supposed to eat salads while the men eat steak? What is with the media image of a woman who has no control over her spending habits when it comes to shoes? Women don’t have the willpower to resist chocolate? Really? I didn’t realize that was all dependent on having a double-X chromosome.

On the other end of the pendulum I think we’ve discounted some valuable skills because we link them to our past opression. I’ve met women who brag that they don’t know how to cook. How many women toss a perfectly good pair of pants out when they loose a button? The lack of skill in these things doesn’t make us better, it makes us stupid.

A self-sufficient 21st Century Amazon is:

Smart enough to make wise choices. It also means being accountable for your choices, good or bad.

Strong enough to meet the physical demands of life. That means boring daily things like opening jars and carrying groceries, as well as preparedness for an emergency.

Skilled enough to meet the necessities of life. It’s all about DIY ladies. Having the skill to change your own tire doesn’t mean you have to do it, just that you can.

So ask yourself this: was there a time this week that I made an effort to be smarter, stronger, or more skilled?

So why am I blogging? What can I offer?

The truth is, I don’t know. I can’t dissect medical publications like Robb Wolf. I haven’t overcome an eating disorder to become strong and spunky like Melissa Urban. I’m certainly not a long-time professional coach like Mike Burgener or have a Phd in kicking ass like Krista. I can’t make fitness sound mystically zen and esoteric like Chip either. I have all of these icons, these heroes that I don’t come close to measuring up to, yet I’ve decided to step into the world-wide ring with them. Why?

I guess I feel or hope that I have the potential to be like them, but in my own way. I feel that the voice of a slightly overweight mom who spends eighty percent of my waking hours in front of a computer screen can add something to the online fitness community. Yes, seriously.

I might hate running and love eating, but that doesn’t mean I don’t also love the feeling I get when I hit a new personal record on deadlifts. I might always be trying to work off that last ten pounds, but by God I’m doing it with kettlebells and red meat instead of aerobesize and grapefruit!

I want a tribe. I want to surround myself with other kickass ladies who bring it to the gym every day, even if they’ll never be competition-strong or model-thin. I want to talk about more than that too. I want to talk about living, eating, playing, fun, stress, and everything else. I have this vision of a modern tribe of warrior women, and I am looking for recruits.