The A Word: Lockdown

This week, I have received many questions from my blog readers asking how I keep up my exercise regime during the lockdown.  Not only is exercise very important to me, but it also helps to alleviate the pain of my autoimmune disease, Ankylosing Spondylitis.  I also believe that if I suffer from Coronavirus, I want to be as healthy as possible to fight it. 

So, the answer is that I do five 40-minute workouts per week in our “homemade” gym.  There are some great fitness instructors online helping us to come up with innovative ways to use our own body weight in our workouts.  Our home gym workout now extends to using everything around us, including our stairs, chairs and garden steps.  In addition to these five weekly workouts, we walk from home daily.  We’ve found some beautiful circular walks in our local area, and last week, I averaged around 18,000 steps per day. 

I’m sceptical about most things I read online these days.  I don’t believe anything written in our newspapers as journalists put whatever spin on a subject to fit their political agenda.  But if you stick to journals (like The New Scientist) and regulated bodies, their information will be more accurate.  This is because they need to be peer-reviewed. This means that other academics have read them before publication and checked that they are making claims backed up by their evidence.

Therefore, I have taken the advice from the Centre for Perioperative Care (CPOC) experts, who say that keeping healthy will help reduce the risk of becoming severely ill with the virus.  Fortunately, most people who get the virus are sick for about a week before improving. However, that’s when the more dangerous symptoms kick in for others.  It appears that the virus can migrate down into the depths of the respiratory tract, and when the virus reaches the lungs, pneumonia begins, and I want to be as strong as possible in case that happens.

In addition to keeping healthy, I’m keen to keep up my beauty regime!  I’m fairly low maintenance as I’m mostly a DIY girl.  I’ve never visited beauty salons, I don’t have sunbed sessions or spray tans, I don’t have hair extensions or false lashes, and I do my own eyebrows, nails and waxing; however, DIY is not something I do for my hair.  I have always budgeted to visit the hairdressers every 6 weeks.  I have no idea what my real hair colour is, and I’m not keen to find out.  So, I’ve bought myself a hair dye from Boots, which will arrive around the 28^th of April, so I’ll reveal it all after this necessary experiment!  If you notice that my social media account has gone quiet, it will be apparent something has gone very badly wrong!  Jamie has also offered to cut my hair, and we’ll be watching some “YouTube” videos first!

Our virtual social life also picked up a bit this week.  We had a great FaceTime call with our friends over a bottle of wine last Saturday night.  We all dressed as if we were going out, and I enjoyed both the dressing up and the chat.  Another friend organised a Zoom quiz (6 teams), which was good fun, and so lovely to see everyone.

In Covid World, the other regular daily event is to watch the briefing from the Government.  One of the journalists asked what we might have done differently as a country knowing what we know now, and it got me thinking about hindsight. 

There is probably an event in our lives every week when with the benefit of hindsight – the wisdom that comes from viewing actions after seeing the consequences – we think we shouldn’t have done that or should have done it this way instead.

But when it comes to life-changing situations like the Coronavirus pandemic, is 20:20 vision after the event fair for official bodies to assess where the fault lies?   Will that process of re-examination go too far? Or is it the only way we learn lessons for the future?

I don’t have the answer, and the question is too big to think about without breaking it down into manageable pieces.   I guess we all reflect on the things we could have done differently.  However, I also realise that if we spend too much of our life regretting our past, our biggest regret will be that we didn’t focus our time and energy on changing the present and the unwritten future.

During my sales training, I was taught that if you don’t have a plan, you won’t achieve your dreams, which I have always stuck by.  So, spending time planning our present and future seems like a much better idea.

Every goal and every dream must take the form of a plan. The old saying “get what you plan for” is so true. Your dream won’t just happen. You must sit down regularly and plan your strategy for achieving the dream. Think through all of the details. Break the whole plan down into small, workable parts. Then, set a time frame for accomplishing each task on your “dream plan.”  These plans don’t need to be complex; wanting to live a healthy, happy life with family and friends is a wonderful ambition.  However, being fit and healthy takes a lot of hard work, and it also means making big changes to daily life.  A plan is even more important when you have an illness or an autoimmune disease, as the focus is often on the disease itself.

The plan is also iterative.  Jamie and I had our remaining work years, and our retirement plan worked out.  When I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, I thought my retirement might look very different, especially if the disease progressed and my mobility was affected.  Six years after that diagnosis, my situation is still OK, even though the disease is active.

I planned to start taking biological drugs to slow its progression.  I suffered an allergic reaction to the drugs on the first attempt and, after waiting 2 years for a new natural, Coronavirus has intervened.  I was due to start taking them a few weeks ago, and I chose not to as I didn’t want to weaken my immune system, thereby changing our plan again.

Even when we have to change our plan, it’s not the end of the world.  Embracing change is no fun, especially when you look forward to achieving those dreams.  But often, something like Coronavirus comes along, and it changes everything.  Change happens to us all—it’s simply a part of life. And while some change is undeniably good, we often face disruptions that certainly don’t feel welcome at the time.

We are all capable of changing, but often, we are unwilling to acknowledge the need to do so.  Among those who do, often, we don’t do what is necessary to make it happen. 

Keep safe, start on a plan to achieve your dreams and embrace change.

Captain Tom Moore is my new hero until next time, xxx

• The A Word : Gen Z, the game-changing generation we’ve been waiting for!
• The A Word: Beyond Limits
• The A Word: Four controversial statements, I wonder what you’ll think?
• The A Word: Overcoming Overthinking
• The A Word: Why high achievers are ditching social media