Why I’m always late.

Running has made me better about being on time.

I’m not sure what came first: I couldn’t run if I didn’t schedule it in. I used to be chronically awful at scheduling anything.

My old friends know I am notorious about being late or flaky. “Is this in real time, or Pattie time?” they’d say. There is something about being tied into an obligation or a schedule that makes me uneasy. I hate giving people false expectations. And it’s hard for me to plan or switch gears and do new things if I’m in the groove of something else.

But if you’re going to fit fitness into a busy day — you have to plan to do it. You have to make it a priority. And if you’re going to meet friends — a key part of what helped me stick with this, I believe — you have to be on time.

Years before I started running — I remember, actually, reading the Oprah magazine at the UMaine gym on the elliptical — I read a magazine article that perfectly described my problem: Transitional Anxiety.

(Reading magazines at the gym is lame. If you’re going slow enough to be able to read, you’re wasting your time there. But that was before …)

The article starts describing this woman, Emma, who could very well have been me: She takes forever to get up, do her hair, brush her teeth. She’s late to work, but that’s OK, because she often stays late, until an external force — her husband — calls to ask if she’s alive. She comes home and stays up late with him, feeling bad that she took so long to come home, starting the cycle all over again.

There’s a key difference between people who become irritated with Emma and those who share Emma’s inability to segue from one thing to the next. The first group has what is known as a monochronic time sense. They see time as fixed, rigid and absolute. On the other side of the spectrum, folks who are polychronic see time as loose and elastic.

Oh yeah. That was me.

The thing that the article goes on to describe that was a real epiphany for me is that the problem is not that I don’t want to start thing #2 but that I have a problem from stopping thing #1.

Disengaging from a given activity is the key to living on schedule. By choreographing and practicing the skill of ending, even polychrones can stay (roughly) on schedule, no matter how much we want to linger.

The article has some good advice, especially the last bit, which says that the ending (transition) deserves half the energy — not that you should stop things abruptly, half-way through, but that you should stop beginning new ideas and tasks and move towards closure.

It took me a long time and a lot of practice to learn this, but now I can get myself to that 5:30 meeting time for a run, because I know that I need to get done by a certain time in order to leave in time to get there.

And it doesn’t just apply to tasks and events in a day, either — it applies to training, too. I’d get far enough into something, feel pretty good about my initial results, and just trail off because I didn’t save the energy for finishing it. Sweaters, websites, blogs, you name it.

But I’m a new Pattie, now. I put all this energy into starting my marathon training, and now I’m at the end, ready for a *fingers crossed* successful dismount.

The new Pattie has gone from event to event — 5K to 10K to half-marathon to marathon — looking towards pushing through for the next one. Very unlike a polychrone. But the marathon, in a way, is closure to the part of my “beginner runner” career. I’m anxious because I don’t know what is next. And really, that’s a good thing, to be so concerned with following through that the idea of not finishing is not even a fear any more.

So, are you a monochrone or a polychrone? Take the quiz.

Pattie Reaves

About Pattie Reaves

I'm a new mom and renegade fitness blogger at After the Couch. I live in Brewer with my husband, Tony, our daughter Felicity, and our two pugs, Georgia and Scoop.