My usual regimen is to run (walking recently due to injury) and ride on an old stationary bike I bought off of Craigslist every morning. I love to walk/run especially in the colder months. It is part nostalgia and part gratitude (being a native New Yorker). When I am out there, often, there are a few others who are braving the cold to get their exercise in. I get to experience the outdoors with relative quiet and a type of solitude that I don’t get throughout the day with my law practice. It also gives me time to think through what is going on with my practice and plan the next steps regarding my cases. Gratitude plays a large part in my exercise regimen. I am grateful for the ability to continue to exercise; I am grateful that when I breathe the cold air in as I walk/run that my lungs can fill up with air without difficulty; I am grateful for being an attorney and all the perks and benefits that go along with practicing law. I find that my practice of exercise inevitably helps my legal practice. This kind of crept up on me. Through me just continuing to engage in my regimen of exercise, I realized that when I skipped an exercise session, I felt like something was missing from the rest of my day. Was this attorney, I marveled at running, experiencing, or had experienced the same or similar thing? Had they figured out that running had the wonderful added benefit of saving their sanity in the face of being in a difficult and stressful profession? I would like to think so.

I think it is important for us as attorneys to find those positive sanity saviors. We are tugged in so many directions the minute we enter our office doors. Our clients demand so very much of us, all the time. We need healthy ways in which to channel these pressures. Ways that don’t involve expending a lot of personal resources necessarily, or ways that require a whole lot of preparation; because those ways involve the one thing that we are usually short on time.

I also find that the things we do to channel those pressures don’t need to involve a whole lot of judgment. When you get out there and exercise in a way that makes you feel better, it often is in a way that you don’t feel judged. No one is judging me when I am wildly panting around the track because no one else is focused on what I am doing. This is another attribute of exercise. If you do it in places where others exercise as well, in my opinion, we all are kind of part of a private club of people that intrinsically understand why we are all there, and celebrate each other’s presence as opposed to criticizing it. Often, when I walk/run outside in my neighborhood, I encounter a neighbor who has, for years now, greeted me and voiced words of encouragement and praise for my efforts. Those types of experiences fill my cup and help restore my sanity. I would not have been able to experience that had I not gotten out there and exercised.