Taking Back Your Day (And Your Identity)

About Episode

Training for and successfully running a marathon is an accomplishment few will ever achieve. Running a marathon in under 4 hours? Fewer people still. But training for a marathon, running it in under 4 hours, and ALSO working as an assistant editor on the TV series Empire? That’s downright insanity!

Or is it?

In this episode I have a candid in-person conversation with Natalie Boschan, my assistant editor and partner in crime, about why she chose to take on this monumental task, and more importantly how it helped her grow stronger as a human being.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: So I’m here today with my partner in crime, an assistant editor, Natalie Boschan, and I’m also here accompanied by a bit of a head cold. So you can bear with me as we get through the episode, but we are here today because Natalie has just recently completed yet another marathon, and she wrote a blog post about this for fitness and post. I guess it was a couple of months ago now, and we will put a link to it in the show notes. But I wanted to talk more about this because I promised her that if she completed the marathon at her goal time, which was under four hours, that I would let her do a podcast. And now I am forcing her to sit here and record a podcast with me. So Natalie, welcome back.

Natalie Boschan: Thank you. Thank you.

Zack Arnold: So the first question that I think anybody working in post production would have for you is why?

Natalie Boschan: I don’t. I don’t know. Glutton for punishment? I don’t know. Running is something that I did for a long time when I was growing up. I think I started in junior high. So was that 12 years old, I did varsity running in high school, and I sort of dropped off the map in college because it’s really hard to go to school and then join a team and do your studies and be in the film program. I’m sure some people have done it before, but I wasn’t something I wanted to do because I was already burnt out from too many activities in high school. So I sort of fell off the map for a while, and at some point around 2012, when I did my first marathon, I started training for my first marathon. I just said, you know what? I just need to get back on the way, and like I just need to do this again because I’m feeling lethargic, and I don’t know. I just needed to do something with my time. I needed to get something done.

Zack Arnold: Well, if I remember not to correct you or not to interrupt you, but I believe that I interrupted all of your plans for your first marathon as well as your second, with all the the work stuff that was going on. So I know that I’ve I’ve kind of gotten in the way of a lot of your marathons.

Natalie Boschan: Oh yeah, that’s true. Yeah, yeah, because I I did my the first L.A. Marathon in 2013, the weekend before I started Burn Notice, and then your

Zack Arnold: First scripted my first job, yeah,

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, which is actually a good thing that I did the marathon before I started that job. So that was actually really good timing. And then this marathon came right in between switching jobs between Empire and now the Netflix show that we’re doing, so yeah, it was a bit of a hectic weekend to be running 26.2 miles, but I mean, obviously, it it worked out. But yeah, that was funny because I basically was doing well. It was actually nice the first marathon because I was freelancing for the last two or no, the last like three or four months of training, I was just freelancing, so I was working from home. So it made training really easy, or made getting training in really easy because I could go whenever I wanted to. But this time around, I had to train while we were on Empire. That was the struggle because I feel like Empire between the months of September and December was just a whirlwind.

Zack Arnold: I believe the word you’re looking for is brutal.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, it was. Yeah, we were up against air dates the whole time. It was it was really hard to be on that show for those months. I mean, January wasn’t so bad, which is the month right before the the race. The race was on February 14th, but September, when I started training, all the way up until January, there were definitely about every four weeks I stopped and I was like, I can’t, I don’t, I can’t train right. I just can’t do it. So I would take a week off, or at least a couple of days, or I would only do two miles a day, or maybe just some yoga or something, just to take a break because sometimes you just get burnt out when you’re doing something like this. It’s just too much sometimes. So I would just take breaks. I think I got sick a couple times too, so that actually helped in keeping a regimented schedule of breaks and versus training versus just taking it easy sometimes. But yeah, it wasn’t an easy thing to do.

Zack Arnold: Well, before going to the obvious question, which is how in the world can you train for a marathon while working on a show like Empire and balance everything else? And you’re also married, so you have a husband and you have a house and you’re trying to have a life outside of work. But before kind of going into the logistics, what are some of the things that you took from your first marathon experience into deciding to train for the second one.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, so the first one I was not terribly experienced. So I mean, a friend, a really good friend of mine, who’s a very good runner and triathlete. She was training me, and she was giving me strength exercises and physical training exercises to do, but I didn’t always do them because when you come back from a 10 mile, 12 mile run, you don’t want to do that. I was I just didn’t have the discipline. I just you know I’d come back from these long runs and I would say no, I’m not doing these strength. I just said this is stupid. I’m not doing it. I’m just gonna go sit down and have some water, pizza, or whatever. I don’t care, but I’ve. Very much had the mindset of a lot of people training, and I have experience, and I have experience in running, and I still had the mindset of saying I’m running 10 miles a day. I could do whatever I want the other, you know, 22 and a half hours of the day or 22 hours a day, but that’s not true. That’s not true at all. As we’ve

Zack Arnold: Learned a lot through some of the interviews that we’ve done for past podcasts, where we’ve learned that just moving intensely for a short period of time during the day, and then sitting for the rest of it, and being an active couch potato, you can’t undo the effects of being sedentary just with exercise. Right. So I think that that’s one of the things that I think, at least that I could tell that was different this time, is that you were still constantly doing things in your edit bay, and you were moving around, and you were stretching, and you weren’t. Because I kind of remember the first time where you would go out for your runs early in the morning, come to work, and just like that’s it. You just sit all day long, not move. You have that mindset of, oh well, I ran 10 miles, so I can have pizza and beer, and I can sit in front of the computer for 12 hours, and you realize that that doesn’t really work.

Natalie Boschan: No, it doesn’t, and it’s not healthy for you, which is why I got injured my first time. I pulled. I thought it was a knee problem, but turns out I had pulled an IT band. So I was. I don’t know. I was. I was running downhill, and when my. I think this was about a month before the race, and I was doing a hill workout, and I was running downhill, and I don’t know, I must have like hyperextended or something. But like when my left, I think it was my left side that time, my left side hit the hit the pavement. I just felt this like sharp pain in my knee, and I was like, “Oh dear God, what did I do? And so that whole month, I couldn’t even run one mile without pain. Like I had this like pain behind my knee, and then all of a sudden, I moved to the top of my knee, and then down my whole leg, and the whole leg was just totally stiff. So I had to actually take the last month before my 2013 marathon off because I couldn’t even move. So I got to the race. I went to the race anyways, and I said, you know what? I trained all these months for this. I am gonna do this. And besides, I took a month off. I’ll probably get about six miles in. Okay, I’ll get a good six miles out of this rest, and then it’ll be hell from there. But the first six miles will be pretty good. But no, I got a mile in, and my knee like seized up, and I couldn’t really bend my legs. Like then the other side was really was in pain too. So like that, because I was making up for the injured side, so then my right side got injured during the race, and so I was basically like shuffling along the whole time. I finn I finished in a decent time, but I think was four hours and 50-seven minutes, which I know is a decent time for your first marathon. But it was not what I was training for. What were

Zack Arnold: You training for?

Natalie Boschan: I was training for sub four hours at that point, and I think I may have been faster at that point too because I trained for longer than I was this time around. Yeah, but because I had I didn’t do my strength training and I didn’t do my physical therapy exercises, I ended up with a 457 instead of a sub four hour, and that was that was just that just wasn’t smart. That is not smart training.

Zack Arnold: You did, however, finish it though. I

Natalie Boschan: Did finish it more

Zack Arnold: Than a lot of healthy people can say.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, I did finish it. I finished it just on the just pure like stubbornness and pride. I think I don’t know, but I yeah I hobbled along, and I finished it. So

Zack Arnold: Well, that having been said, the reason I wanted to bring up your past experience

Natalie Boschan: Is

Zack Arnold: Because I’m going to come back to the same question that I had earlier, which is why. However, I want to go deeper into the science of defining your why and finding your motivation and your purpose, because to say, “Ooh, I want to run a marathon and I want to do it while I’m being an assistant editor slash co-editor on Empire. See how I threw that in for you, by the way. When you’re doing that for the first time, you’re thinking, I don’t really know what I’m getting into, but this could be crazy. But you did know what you were getting into, and you hobbled your way painfully through a marathon already right before you started a crazy, stressful job. So what I want to do is kind of break down psychologically how you define your why, because that’s the thing that helps you wake up earlier in the morning than you want to wake up. It helps you do the strength training when you don’t want to do the strength training. It helps you do the stretching exercises and stay mobile at 4o’clock in the afternoon after you’ve run a 16-mile, you know, training session earlier in the morning, and you’re sitting in front of dailies, and you’re thinking, all I want to do is curl up on this couch and go to sleep. So I want to drill in a little bit deeper and understand your why, because people think that you set this big goal and it’s all about willpower, and I just have to have the willpower, and just I got to grip my teeth and do it. But that’s not the way to really get it done, you talk to or read about successful people over and over and over and over and over. They know how to put willpower almost on autopilot because they’ve properly defined why something is important to them. So let’s dig a little bit deeper, and I want to find out what is what was your true motivation because it’s clearly not. Want to be fit, or I want to lose weight, which are fairly superficial reasons to try something. So let’s dig deeper and find out why were you able to sustain something like this for so long. Then we’ll get into the nitty gritty of what your day looked like and your training regimen and all that kind of stuff.

Natalie Boschan: So as you’re asking that question, I think I have a way of summing it up pretty succinctly. Is that I just, I think I was just tired of my work defining me, so that’s what I always did. I got up, I went to work, I came home, I watched more television, I went to bed, I cooked dinner in there, and I looked through all these hours and I said, well, what, you know, what do I do with my time? I go to work. That’s what I do with my time. I don’t spend time with my friends. I don’t spend as much time with my husband. I don’t spend time. I don’t have enough time to like call my mom as often as I’d like to, or catch up with family members because I’m at work, and that’s what defines me. Is I can’t because I’m at work. I do this because I can’t. I can’t do X, Y, or Z because I’m at work. Blah blah blah. I was just sort of tired of that being my life, so I decided that well, I need to do something else. I need to feel better. I need to do something else that’ll get me to stop being defined by work. So what can I do? I can run. I’m good. I’m relatively. I used to be good at that. I did that for a while. I know that world, so I took a step back from my schedule and I said, “How am I going to run? What am I going to run? And I said, “Well, I have two hours of television a night, and it takes me two hours to cook dinner, so that’s like four hours of free time, and I get up an hour before work, maybe an hour and a half because of commute. So in there, that’s what five and a half hours of time somewhere, so I was like, “Well, I need to cut out some of this television. I need to find an easier way to cook at night, and I can find myself an hour to an hour and a half to work out and do something else and be more productive and feel better. And this will sort of drive me to be way more regimented and way more-I don’t know-just a more well-rounded person, and I think that that will make me happier to be more well-rounded. So this is the first thing I’m going to do to become a better person. I think not saying that running makes you a better person, but I wanted to be-I wanted more than just Natalie Bochan, assistant editor. So I decided that I’m going to get up early, and to do that, I have to go to bed early, and to do that, I need to figure out how I’m going to get tired and get to bed earlier, and I have to just come up with this scheme to make myself do all of these things. So I did it piece by piece. So I tried just getting up earlier, just going to bed at the same time and getting up earlier. That wasn’t fun, so I decided that well, I can’t watch television until 11:30 and then try to go to bed after that. I can only watch television until at the latest 11 o’clock. I have to cut myself off at 11 o’clock because I’m not going to be able to get up in the morning if I don’t do that, and I’m going to feel terrible, and I don’t want to feel terrible because I hate the morning. Never been a morning person, but I felt that if I started running, I would have to be a morning person, and it would wake me up. And actually, looking back on when I did train in the morning, it takes a lot of effort for me to get out the door and to actually get out there, but when I am running, I feel great. Like after that first initial, like get out of bed, get the training clothes on, get out the door, the first mile I feel great.

Natalie Boschan: Like it’s the morning air is really nice and the morning sun is really nice, and it’s just great to be able to go out and be outside right before you go to work, like there’s nothing there’s nothing better than starting your day out by being outside. And sometimes when I had really long runs, because there were days when I had runs that go that I think the most I did before work was 12 miles. I almost did 16 miles one day before work and decided that was a bad idea, but I almost did it. I think I got 12 was the most, and so I ended up at the beach for because I’m I’m only a few miles from the beach. I live on a bike path, and so I ended up at the beach for an hour before I went to work. And I just thought I just really that’s I mean that’s a great way to start your day, and it makes you feel way better, especially because my office didn’t have any windows. So being able to have taken some of that vitamin D at the beginning of the day was awesome.

Zack Arnold: Well, and before you go any further, I think that one thing to bring up that’s really interesting is you had said, “Well, you know, this will make me a better person. Not that running makes you a better person, but in this sense, running actually did help make you a better person because you would walk into the office having barely woken up, rushing to get done. Maybe grab some coffee and whatever. Walk in and just be like, “Ugh.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah. And

Zack Arnold: Then when you were training, I was like, “Good morning. How are you today? Like you, you just you see the world differently. And also because, and this is a really really key component. Is you’ve taken back your mornings and you’ve set a pace for the day, and the sleep that you get the night before and the morning that you set for yourself is the ultimate force multiplier for the day ahead, and that’s something that I didn’t know myself until a couple years ago because I was not a morning person either. Slept as long as I possibly could until, of course, one of my children would wake me up at six or 630 but then I would plop him in front of the TV, sleep next to them for two more hours until the nanny showed up, sleepwalk to the shower, literally fall asleep on the way to work if I was stuck in traffic. I never actually would drive sleepy, but if I were stuck on the one on one and I was in a dead stop, I can remember times where I would be woken up by somebody honking, and the next car would be 100 feet in front of me.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah,

Zack Arnold: That was my life. That was how I survived having two young kids and working on burn notice. It was not a good way to survive, and was when I discovered how important setting your morning up really is that everything changed for me, and my stress levels went down, my anxiety levels went down, my productivity skyrocketed. I was going home earlier, and I think you experienced a lot of the same things where you were saying, “I am just not a morning person. This is ridiculous, but then you actually started to do it. I remember you coming in one day, and you’re like, “This morning thing, like this is really working.

Natalie Boschan: It is well because you start to feel like your time is your own at that point. Like when you can get up and do something for yourself before you go into work, it feels like you’re dictating your day, and it’s not like I’m getting up because I have to go to this place where I’m going to be for the next 10 hours, and and like look, I really like my job, I do, but still, like just the the fact that I am forced to get out of my bed to go to this place with no windows, it just makes me feel awful. So instead, I got up and I got to go for a run first, and then I can get you know I get in the shower and then I get my coffee and I kind of have more time in the morning because I build that in because I always I just told myself I’m waking up at seven, no matter what the workout is, to keep myself on a schedule, which meant that I had an hour after that to myself to just hang out with myself and read whatever newsletter for the day, or I just got to catch up on current events and do and just sort of take back my mornings for me, and then I could go to work and say, oh, I’m here, I’m ready to work, and I feel great about that because I’ve gotten, you know, I’ve had time for myself for the next the last two hours, and it’s been well almost three hours because then I started my commute into something more enjoyable too. I start doing my books on tape or audio books, whatever you want to call them. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: I give her a lot of crap for saying books

Natalie Boschan: On tape. I say books on tape a lot. It’s been a while. Not actually on tape. I don’t have a tape player around my iPad, but yeah. So I do like I listen to my books, my audio books, and then or a podcast, and then my my commute doesn’t seem terrible either. So I just feel like it’s about owning something and feeling like you’re in control of your schedule.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think that again, I’m going to keep harping on this, and we’ll go deeper and deeper into some tactical stuff. So people are wondering, well, if I want to do this, maybe not run a marathon, but you want to run a 5K or something, and you think, well, there’s just no way I can do it on my schedule. We can dig a little bit deeper into some of the tactical things that we did to help Natalie become more productive. But again, I want to keep harping on this. The the reason that you were able to get up at 7o’clock not being a morning person, was not because at 650-nine you said, “I’m training for a marathon and I’m going to finish the marathon. That’s not the point to take away. The point to take away is you said, “I’m going to run a marathon because I don’t want my work to define me and I want to find my own identity again. Defining that why first is so much more important than worrying about the tactics and saying, “Well, I need to increase my productivity by doing this, this, and this, and I need to change my sleep schedule, and I need to rearrange when I watch TV and when I cook. Like those are all great; those are all good strategies. They’re all worthless if you don’t have the foundation under you, and your foundation into it’s it’s called like what I call a purpose filter. You created this filter through which all of your questions were coming, and most of them probably weren’t conscious; they were subconscious. But you ask yourself at 659 in the morning, ugh, do I really feel like getting up? And the filter that that goes through is: Is this going to help me find my identity? Is sleeping in going to help me find my identity, or am I going to continue to be defined only as an assistant editor?

Natalie Boschan: The

Zack Arnold: Question too: Will waking up at seven a.m. help me find my identity? Yes. That’s why you wake up, not well. I want to finish a marathon in under four hours. That’s the mistake that the vast majority of people make: is they set a goal, and their goal is vague and it’s superficial, and they’re not digging deeper into why they want to achieve that goal. And even deeper beyond that is extending the benefit of that why beyond yourself. So I’m assuming that there was probably some part of this. It was not just about you; it was about the bigger picture as well. Would that be the case now that you’re married?

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, because what was also great, specifically to that, is that Jonathan would get up with me sometimes, and he would go on his bike, and we would take the dog with us, and so we’d have some time in the morning together. And he really liked it too, and he started getting up earlier as well. And so, because he knew that that was the time he had to spend with me was these mornings, this new couple of hours I found in the morning, and so I’m if I’m a happier person, then I don’t snap at him and I don’t make bad decisions when I come home at night and you know just kind of I’m not cranky and I’m not angry or anything like that because I feel like I’ve you know one you get out all that sort of energy to be cranky and you know agitated, and two when you start your day off by going to the beach, there’s not much to be angry about. Like it just there’s not much to be angry about. But to the point that you were saying about everything being going through the filter of you know this is going to help me run my marathon. The thing about that is also that you can’t just wake up at seven a.m. and say I need to do this because I need to run an under four-hour marathon because there’s not a complete that there’s not a direct cause and effect right there. I know it that I have to do I have to do this in order to do a good time like I know that consciously, but because of how much I hate waking up! I’ll only tell myself like I don’t really need that’s it’s three months away. How is this actually you know one morning gonna affect everything? Well, one morning turns into two mornings, and one and two mornings turn into three mornings, and it just spirals out of control from there, and you just kind of give up at that point. So because it is a broad and sort of lofty goal, and because you don’t have a direct link every day, like you have to, you know, it’s april 14, you have to finish your taxes. Yeah, april 15, taxes are due. Like that’s a direct, you know, you have to do that that day, or you will get incur late fees. Like you have to do that in October. I don’t have to get up at seven in the morning to run a race in February when I hate waking up so much. I don’t rationalize it that way. I just the only thing I can rationalize at that point is I want to stay in bed. But knowing that if I get up now, I am going to have a way better morning and a way better day, and I am going to just feel better about myself and my life in general, and it’s gonna it’s gonna make me a better person, and it’s gonna make me do all. It’s just gonna create this great energy throughout the day. Like that is a reason to wake up and to continue to do this every day. That’s why it’s much easier to do that when you start biting it off little piece by little piece, instead of just looking, you know, instead of having it so far off in the future. So

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s really what I wanted to get to is the idea that it’s very hard to set long-term lofty goals and connect them to what needs to be done that day, that morning, this time when you’ve already done something 35 times in a row, and you have to do it 30-sixth time. If it’s always about that long-term goal, it’s hard to stick with. However, if you start to develop systems around your goals, that’s where things really start to become magical, and you always have something to fall back on. As opposed to, well, all right, I’m supposed to run this thing in three months, and I missed this morning because I was tired, but whatever. It’s not that big of a deal. I still have three more months, and then the next day, well, all right, I missed it again. But still, I have three more months to catch up. As opposed to if you say to yourself, my system is, I’m just going to wake up at 7o’clock every day, and I’m doing that because I want to run the marathon, but I’m also doing it because I want to have more energy? I want to be better at my job. Then it’s no longer well. I have this thing a long ways off. It’s this is today. This is immediate. This is every single day, and this is a system. And I’m following a certain system, and that’s where you start to hack your psychology and get away from the idea of this long-term goal. And willpower is still there, but you’re number one strengthening the willpower muscle, and number two, you don’t need it as much. So

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, and what’s great is that because I start with the one system in the morning, like, well, what if I did this for other things? What if I continued to do this for when we found or when you found prep dish and you told me about it and I tried it and the first couple weeks was hard, but then the next couple weeks I was like, I’m always doing this. Like I so now I do prep dish at least twice a month or sometimes three times a month and so I started systematizing that and I started systematizing how I go to bed and it just like keeps snowballing from there, and I feel great. For anybody

Zack Arnold: Wondering what prep dish is, by the way, we will all. This is a podcast that I did. I don’t know a month or two ago. We can put a link to it, but it’s basically a meal preparation system that, if you’re a post workflow junkie like we are, basically it’s post workflow for food.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, it’s it’s really.

Zack Arnold: Really cool. It’s a great service that I’ve fallen in love with as well, and I don’t use it quite as much as you do. But it’s something that I certainly use. But now that we’re kind of talking about post workflows, now I want to start geeking out a little bit because to me, the tactics and the tips and the systems and all the nitty gritty worthless without the foundation and the psychology. Now that we’ve established that, now we can geek out on the cool stuff.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah,

Zack Arnold: Because it’s funny. I I saw that happening to you, where it’s like you had a taste of the crack, and then you want a more crack, and you want a more crack, and oh, I this is great. Tell me, tell me, let’s talk about this. How do you do this? How do you build this system? Yeah, and

Natalie Boschan: I and I don’t actually do crack. No, that’s a that’s a metaphor. Yeah, you feel me? You feel empowered. Like once you take back, so like I never thought that I could get up in the morning. Like I don’t think I can really stress how much I hate mornings. I can stress it. I’ve known you

Zack Arnold: For a long time.

Natalie Boschan: Like my college roommates would like they thought it was funny to like make like I just it’s I hate them so much. But if I could take back my morning, then I can take back all this other time when you go home and you think, “Oh, I’m just gonna. I don’t know what to do with myself right now, so I’m just gonna watch TV. And you feel like you don’t know what to do with yourself because you sort of lost in the woods at that point because you don’t know that’s that’s what you that’s what you’ve been doing for so many years, but when for me personally, when I took back my mornings and made them for me again, that means I can do that for everything. Why can’t I not be tired at the end of the workday? Like, why can’t I find that energy somewhere? Why can’t I like take back the rest of my time? And why can’t my day be mine as opposed to just waking up and like sitting in traffic, going to work, coming home, and feeling like crap. Like I don’t have to feel like crap anymore. I can do this empowering.

Zack Arnold: Yes, it is, and that that’s exactly what happened to me. Where you just you go through your whole life reacting to things. Your whole life is just reactive. You wake up late, you react to the kids, you react to driving to work. Somebody cuts you off. You react to that. By this point, most people have checked their email three or four times. You’re reacting to other people’s agendas. You’re responding to their agendas. You’re on Facebook, responding to other people’s lives. You get to work. People are asking things of you. I want this. I want that. You’re reacting. I should get this for you. I should get that for you. And over the course of a day, that exhausts you to the point where you’ve been sitting in front of your desk all day long, reacting to other people and what they need from you, and by the time you do have time to yourself at 789, o’clock at night when you get home, your brain has said enough.

Natalie Boschan: Yep,

Zack Arnold: Which is why statistically the average American watches four hours of television in a single day because you’re so tired of reacting and thinking, you just want to zone out and be a zombie. And what people will always ask me is, “Well, how do you have the time and the energy? Where do you find the energy to do all these things? I say, “I don’t find energy; I generate it. You you can create the energy that you want, and a lot of it is just by moving around the office and doing all the crazy weird that you see me doing or that I’ve shown you how to do. But at the end of the day, I’m not using willpower to say I don’t want to watch TV. It’s because I’ve chosen to structure my day in such a way that my mornings are mine for the most part. Sometimes I give my mornings to my daughter, or she takes them from me every once in a while as well. I will be perfectly honest there, but for the most part, I’m setting the agenda on when I’m going to connect with the outside world, and I’m going to check my email, and I’m going to check Facebook. I blocked out what I’m going to do during the day, and I don’t feel like I’m constantly reacting. So I can take that time back, and I watched you do a lot of that, as well. Where first it was the mornings, then it was the evenings, and then one of the things I want to talk about that I believe, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but really allowed you to not only train but have the energy to come to work and perform at a high level-not just barely get by being exhausted, but perform at a high level-was discovering time blocking.

Natalie Boschan: Oh, I love time blocking so much.

Zack Arnold: So let’s talk a little bit about that because that’s a topic that I dive into extensively in my online course. And talking to you about time blocking is like talking to a five-year-old about Santa Claus.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, I know it’s the best. I love time blocking. So starting off on having to well, your point about reacting to the world, because as an assistant editor, that is your day is just responding to requests and responding to people, and that’s a lot a lot of your day. You don’t get a lot of time to yourself to just get your work done because you have a certain amount of to dos you have to do, but there’s not a lot of time you get to yourself. You’re getting interrupted. People are coming in. They’re talking to you. They’re saying, “I need this. I need this. I need this. I need this. So all day.

Zack Arnold: Not me though. I never would do that.

Natalie Boschan: You wouldn’t do that. Never.

Zack Arnold: Never need that. Zack doesn’t

Natalie Boschan: Need anything. No, but every day someone needs something, and there’s always a push and a pull, especially if you’re on a show that doesn’t has less assistance than editors. If you’re on a three-two, you’ve got. Producer and then multiple editors to juggle all your work between, and so there’s a lot of like pulling in multiple directions. So the best, so like the great thing about having this sort of mindset where your time is yours allows you to do things like time blocking. So the best time block they say is 52 minutes on, 17 minutes off. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: Scientifically, the research they’ve done is 50-two on, 17 off. But if you’ve never time blocked before, that’s an incredibly overwhelming amount to start with. So I think I told you to start with 20 or 20-five minutes.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, but well, for me, because I can spend so much time with myself, because I can do the the long runs and whatnot, doing that isn’t isn’t a big deal. Like being able to focus for that long a time isn’t wasn’t as big of a stretch or as big of a leap. But the cool thing about time blocking is that you know that after that 25 then 30, then 4050, minutes, you’re going to give yourself a break. I think part of the problem with not being able to do it is that you look at your day. You come in at nine or 10 a.m. and you’re not going to take lunch until one. So you’ve got three or four hours where you’re just you just have work in front of you, and that’s a long time to just look at the day and be like, I can’t take a break for four hours. Well, you can every 50 minutes you get a break, and so that always forced me to stay in it in those 50 minutes because I can take a break for 10 minutes only in 50 minutes, not in four hours, but in 50 minutes I can take a break. And so that was that helped discipline me to do it. And also because I had this mentality of my time is mine, I didn’t really answer emails, or I mean, I know that like urgent things come up, and if something is urgent, someone will come into your bay and knock down the door. Like you need to do this right now. Okay, I’ll do it now. But most of the time, the day was, you know, if I get dailies in, if I have four or five hours of dailies, I just want to get those done and off my plate because that’s a tedious task to do. It’s not annoying. It’s part of my job. And just to

Zack Arnold: Specify, if there’s anybody that’s listening to this that is not in the post-production industry, just to clarify, we do indeed save lives. Yes. And when somebody says ASAP, they mean as soon as possible because somebody could die at any moment. Yes. So I just want people to understand the urgency of what we do for a living. We don’t just entertain; we save lives.

Natalie Boschan: Yes, exactly. I just

Zack Arnold: Want to make make that very, very clear.

Natalie Boschan: Exactly.

Zack Arnold: One to go back a little bit. I realized that I probably should have defined time blocking a little bit more clearly for people that may not know the concept. Time blocking is not just saying I’m going to take a break in 50 minutes. Yeah. Time blocking is saying for 50 minutes I’m doing one task. I am not checking my email. I have my browser tabs closed. I do not have Facebook in front of me. I’m not getting notifications on my phone, and I think dailies is a perfect example for you because that’s really where I saw a monumental shift in your productivity was with dailies, where in the past this is not because you’re not good at what you do; it’s because you didn’t have a system set up. You would be doing if you got four hours of dailies, you’d be doing those first several hours. That was like a good half a day, and then I remember, and you can go into this more specifically, but you’d almost turn it into a game where you would walk in, you would get four or five hours of dailies, you would bound into my office and be like, “Ha! I just did all my dailies in two blocks, bitches.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, yeah, that’s 250-minute blocks for four hours. It was awesome because I wouldn’t finish dailies until I had this thing where I always bet myself. I’m like, I’m gonna finish dailies by 3o’clock today, but then I wouldn’t every day. It was always 3o’clock no matter when I started. I’d always finish them at three, and it was getting really annoying to not be able to finish those before lunch. So yeah, what I do when I get the dailies in, I get them in. I have my whole system for organizing them and for bringing in the paperwork and doing all that. So I do that right off the bat. Then I start my timer, and when I have my timer set, I don’t check email. I don’t go on GChat. I don’t have Facebook open up and all that stuff you listed. I don’t have any of it open. I remember when you told me that you were like, “Yeah, when you time back, you don’t check email. I’m like, “Whoa. You looked at me like

Zack Arnold: I was asking you to murder somebody. Yeah, I

Natalie Boschan: Was like, “Well, somebody’s gonna be. Wait a second. You want me

Zack Arnold: To do what now? Yeah. You’re like, “No, no, no, I can’t do that. I’m like, “Just trust me. Just try it. And you always. It’s it’s funny because whenever I will bring some harebrained crazy idea to you. You always give me the same look. Okay, and I wish this were a video podcast because I can’t do it justice in audio. But I always know you’re going to give me the same look when I when I show you something new. And then two or three days later, like this is awesome. I love this. This is great. Yeah, and it was the same reaction to time blocking. And I remember when I talked about this with another editor colleague. I won’t mention who this person was, but I said, “Listen, I’ve gotten to the point. I don’t have email, Facebook, Twitter, or anything on my phone. I’ve deleted those apps, and I don’t have connection with them at all. And people think I’m nuts. This is how I’m able to leave work at 630 or 7o’clock every day. I still answer emails. I’m still.” On Facebook, but it’s not a guilty pleasure,

Natalie Boschan: Right?

Zack Arnold: Because I’ve chosen when I want to do it, so I’m not guilty about the fact that I’m doing it, as opposed to years and years of scanning through a Facebook feed, thinking, “Oh God, I should really be working right now, but I don’t have the focus. That stuff is designed to suck you in and remove your productivity and your focus.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah. So

Zack Arnold: You were getting more done in way less time, taking more breaks, and you and I were getting dirty looks because nobody thought we were doing anything. When in fact we were immensely productive. Yeah, but you just you don’t see it from the outside because we’re not sitting there cranking away like machines. Yeah, we have a system. There’s a method to the madness.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, exactly. And I I put my phone on airplane mode when I’m in my time block, I don’t have anything. Which I told one of my friend, I had the same experience. I was talking to a friend, and he was like, “I can’t. I just can’t get things done. I don’t even. I think it’s me. I think I think there’s something wrong with me. Like other people can get things done. I can’t. And I told him about time blocking. I was like, “I don’t do GChat. I don’t do. I turn my phone off, or I put it on airplane mode. He’s like, “You don like, no, I don’t do G Chat for my blocks. He’s like, oh my god! And he did the same thing when he called me. He’s like, I just time blocked today, and it was awesome. And yeah, there’s there’s one story in particular when so I got my first co editor credit on an episode of Empire that’s going to air later in the year. But when I got so I was tasked with I had was that three scenes that came in so I had to do three scenes and they had to get cut in a day and I had to do my own dailies. This is the first time I’ve had to do that. I’ve had the responsibility to do that and get it to the director. So I was like, all right, I’m coming in at 8:30 and I’m time blocking the hell out of my day and that’s what I did. I just all day between 830 and I got everything out by six. I just time blocked. I took a lunch break. I took my hour lunch break, but then I just time blocked the whole day and I did my dailies and I got my scenes out and they went right through and they’re gonna air that way. So it’s like I did everything that I was supposed to do in the time that I was allotted, and everybody’s like, “Oh, they’re done. Yeah, they’re done. Oh, oh, okay. Do you need OT? No, I don’t need OT. Oh, well, okay. So that was when I was real. That was like the real eye opener. Was when I was just like super like focused land right there. And that’s why

Zack Arnold: People give me the dirty looks. Yeah. Why are you leaving so early? It’s because I’m good with my time. I’m very efficient with my time, and it’s funny because if you would ask somebody about how we work, they’d say, “Well, you guys are talking to each other half the day, and you’re walking around, and you’re taking walks in the afternoon.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, and

Zack Arnold: People say, “Well, I could never do that. Like, I just have to keep working. And there are days, of course, where the totally hits the fan, and you have a 14-hour day, nonstop, no time blocking, no lunches. Like those days exist. Like we do not live in Shangri-La, but at the same time, for people that say, “Well, I just I have no time in the day to take breaks, it’s not true. You just haven’t organized your day enough where you can make the time because this is all proven by scientific study. This is just not some random experiment of two people. This is all backed by legitimate science that your brain is not capable of doing focused, intense work for more than a total of three to four hours per day, and it can’t do it for more than an hour at a time. So the longer you go thinking you’re in the zone, you’re just burning yourself out, even if it’s over just for the period of a day. But you’re gonna have to recover. But I think you found the same thing that I have that when you work this way, you have much more mental stamina over longer periods of time. And I found myself at 910, 11 o’clock at night thinking, I feel just as good as I did this morning. Like I would like to go to bed now, but I just remember years ago collapsing on the couch at 9o’clock thinking I can’t move.

Natalie Boschan: It’s that horrible tired feeling. But then I’ve been sitting all day. Why am I tired? That tired without having actually done anything, feeling it’s awful. Like you just feel heavy. Like I, I always feel it like in my feet. Like I’m like like when I’ve been sitting all day, you just like like everything feels heavy for no reason, and it’s just a tear. Even when you’re not doing anything all day, like even if you have a day where you’re sort of just waiting around for notes, but you’re sitting and you’re just chilling all day, and you get home and you’re like, “Why am I tired? I literally did nothing all day, and yeah, now that’s not really the case. And the job is just more fun now, like being able to do these time blocks and do these focus. Like it doesn’t feel like work is my punishment. Like it doesn’t feel like I’m trying to get away from work by you know chatting on GChat or going to Facebook and just being and just thinking oh can’t wait till I get out of here so I can go hang out with my friends or do something else like I’m at work and now I’m having a lot more fun with it because I have a specific time set for work time I have specific time set for social time and it just makes the job more fun it doesn’t make it. I don’t feel like I have to pry myself away from something that I enjoy doing. Not that I don’t enjoy my work, but you know, when you’re talking with your friends or you’re on Facebook, like you get that dopamine. You get that that’s enjoyable to people. I don’t, you know, there’s not a lot of people out there who say unless you don’t like your friends, I would rather sit in front of my computer and do my work than talk to my friends or my family. I mean that that exists. I know that exists, but you know you don’t ever feel like you’re getting pulled away from all that to do work. Like work is just more fun. Work is something that you’re choosing to do, and you’re enjoying yourself doing it. So that’s a lot of the takeaway I found with this whole marathoning journey. Is it’s just it was just an excuse and like a springboard and a way to start taking my time back and just enjoying my day and getting way more out of my day than I did by just waking up and like getting myself to work begrudgingly.

Zack Arnold: Yeah. So once again, we can really see that we’ve used your own psychology to develop the willpower or motivation to get over those hurdles of things you don’t think you can get through, because if for four months it was I’m gonna wake up and I’m gonna train so I can run a marathon in under four hours, like I don’t think you would have been able to stick with it if you weren’t getting the little wins every single day that made you say, wait, this isn’t just about the marathon anymore. Like training for a marathon has led to all these other smaller micro habits that I’m creating that are actually just making my life more enjoyable and better.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah.

Zack Arnold: So I think that’s that’s a really important way to look at something where it’s not just about the macro; it’s really about the micro more than anything. Right. So before we’re done, I do want to get into very very micro type questions. So the first is, what actual program did you use? Because I’m assuming you didn’t just randomly decide I’m going to run X number of miles. So somebody decides they want to run a marathon or a half marathon or whatnot. How did you actually know how to train? Because I wouldn’t even know where to start.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, I did this program called the Run Smart Project. I’ll find the actual link. I don’t know it off the top of my head, but it’s called the Run Smart Project, and they’re great. It’s Dr. Jack Daniels, and that’s not a drinking joke. That was his name. Dr. Jack Daniels is this great coach and Olympic trainer, and he has these amazing running programs. He he uses the philosophy that I sort of adhere to. There are many people who just go out and run miles, and they just rack in the miles, and that’s how they train. Or there’s people who just do the hit training, high intensity training. But this is a great mix of every you know you have your one, you have your long run, and then I have I had one really long run per week. I had okay. So I start from the beginning. I decided to run four days a week, and then do one day of yoga as a recovery, one day off, and one day of cross training. So biking or swimming, or just strength training. I did T 25 DVDs for a little while. I stopped that after a little after some time, and I can go into that a little bit later. But some days I would just do like the really intense T 25 program on my cross training day. Yeah, but the four four days running, there was just there was two sort of middle days, like a middle distance, one really long day, and then there was one interval day where you get your you really get your heart rate up most of the time, but the long distance day too wasn’t always just go run 10 miles. It was run 10 miles at your marathon pace. Okay, run three more miles at your under marathon pace, and like it wasn’t. It was always pushing you farther. So I’d always have to run these long runs at like 30 seconds faster than my goal time. So it always kind of like pushes your heart rate a little bit, so you can keep improving. So that program was really great, and I really recommend it. And I’m probably going to use it for my next marathon because I’m going to do it again. Because like I said, I’m a glutton for punishment. But yeah, so I love I love that program. And doing yoga, I do I use Yogi’s Anonymous, which is great when you’re only because if you want to do yoga before work and you’ve got to get there by 10, you’ve got to get up at like five in the morning so you can get to a six a.m. class or you’ve got to get there, do the class, get home, shower, and I just don’t have time for that. So and the parking,

Zack Arnold: Don’t forget the parking.

Natalie Boschan: In the parking, yeah, and I just don’t want to get in my car that early in the morning, it just sounds terrible. So doing Yogi’s Anonymous is great. You know, you find a room in your house that you can kind of stay secluded from everybody. The Yogi’s Anonymous is great to be able to supplement that. And then cross training was just whatever fun thing I wanted to do: swim, bike, take a break from running, just do something different with my muscles. Yeah. So it was it was a pretty successful training program, I think, and I’m going to keep using it. I’ve used it for two other half marathons as well, so I’ve used it for a marathon and two half marathons, and I think I’m going to keep using it. And they have other programs too. They’ve got 5Ks, they’ve got 10Ks, half marathons, marathons. Like they have a whole, and they have different levels of marathon. They’ve got 15 week, 18 week, and. 24-week training courses, so it’s a great program. The strength training too. So at some point, I decided to do a Spartan race because my good friend was going to be doing one, and we pulled Zack into doing it too in January. Oh,

Zack Arnold: You did not pull too hard. Yeah,

Natalie Boschan: It’s true. Hey, I’m doing a Spartan race. Oh, great idea! I’ll do one too. So yeah. So at that point, I was like, okay, I need to do. And I oh yeah, going back to the whole, I didn’t do any strength training, and that sort of you know that wasn’t good. So I would do about 20 minutes to 30 minutes a day of strength training. And at first, I was doing my T 25 DVDs, which would be you know running in the morning, and then I do 25 minutes of strength right afterwards. But that was just becoming too time consuming, and so I decided once I don’t know which podcast it was. Maybe it was the Ben Greenfield, the latest Ben Greenfield one. Yeah, it was the latest Ben, the sedentary Ben Greenfield podcast, where you guys said you know doing 310 minute breaks is better than just 130 minute time block. And I so I woke up one morning and I did my run and I was like, I just don’t want to do 30 minutes of strength training right now. I just want to go in the shower and go to work. So I was like, 310 minute blocks is better than 30 minutes. You know, all at once. I’m gonna do that. I’m gonna start doing that. So I just started doing the strength train, the the 310 minute blocks at work instead of right after my runs, and that was amazing. I think I was I think I gained more strength faster doing that than by doing the T25 DVDs, you know. And I say T25 is bad, but too much, too much jumping. So yeah, and you just get more for it. It’s nice to have a variety. So yeah, I did that instead, and I feel like I got, like I said, I got stronger faster by just doing that than sitting there because it’s it’s hard to work out for two hours straight. It does. You know, as much as like I talk about being empowered, like that is hard. That’s hard to do for two hours. So it was, and it’s just a great break at work. Like it’s great to have an energy break and to get up and move around. So it was, it was a win-win-win.

Zack Arnold: So that being the case, talking about the tools that you use to learn how to train for the marathon, let’s now dig into a couple of our favorite tools when it comes to training for focus and time blocking.

Natalie Boschan: Trello. Trello would certainly be one

Zack Arnold: Of them.

Natalie Boschan: My favorite, Trello, the best.

Zack Arnold: I’ve completely transformed you into a Trello monster.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, I love Trello.

Zack Arnold: Well, it’s funny. I wasn’t actually thinking of Trello so much. That’s certainly one that we’ve talked about for our post-production workflows, and we are building a habit workflow in Trello as we speak, actually. But the two that I was thinking of, actually one that I use, and then one that both of us use. But that would be our recent discovery of Toggle.

Natalie Boschan: Oh, Toggle. Yeah, I was going to use Toggle. I’m trying to use Toggle more for my everyday. Okay, well, what what is Toggl? Toggle is a time tracking app or time tracking site.

Zack Arnold: We’ll link to it, but for anybody listening, it’s T O G G L without the E, so it’s clever spelling. So if you’re searching for it right now, you’re like, I can’t find it. That’s why T O G G l.com

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, and Toggle is just a way to just track your time, and when we were when I was getting really into time blocks, then I was tracking my time and seeing how much I worked versus how much break time I took because I started tracking how much I worked out during the day and how much I worked. That’s pretty eye opening to see how much work you actually do in a day, or how much

Zack Arnold: Work you don’t do in a day.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, that too. Yeah, but that’s cool. Like to get everything done, because like I said, that day where I had to cut those scenes, I think I actually only put in seven hours of work, like where I was focused, and and I didn’t do I didn’t do bad work, like I didn’t just slap scenes together. Like what I cut is gonna be on the air, and the only note I got was change a score cue. Actually, I didn’t put score cues in. We don’t do that. No, no, we have our

Zack Arnold: Music editors do that.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, we don’t do that.

Zack Arnold: Picture editors don’t do music.

Natalie Boschan: No, we’ll cut that part out. Yeah, no, no, we’ll cut that part out. But yeah, so there were no picture notes. So I did seven hours of work on my first with my first co-editing credit, and that you know, or it only took seven hours to get my first co-editing credit, and that’s what’s going to air. And so I was like, I don’t know, seeing all that is just eye-opening. It just makes you feel good because there are plenty of days when you leave this job not feeling good about yourself, but that day I got to feel good about myself. So that was pretty great. Yeah. So

Zack Arnold: Toggle is one. The other two that I’ll throw in there that are big for me. I know you don’t use them, but they’re lifesavers for me. One of them is break time. Break time has nothing to do with break dancing, so it’s not like break time. But it’s a it’s an app for 499 that you can install on your desktop computer. I don’t believe it works on phones or iPads. I think it’s just for desktop, but it’s just this little timer that’s in your upper menu, and you can set it for a certain amount of time. And mine is 50 minutes, so every 50 minutes, my screen goes black, and it puts a timer on the screen, and it says that I have whatever time I set, which I set for five minutes. I can’t use my computer for five minutes. So no matter what I’m doing, when I see that countdown, I’m like, oh crap! I better save. I better do whatever I need to do and walk away for five minutes. And it always forces me to get into that rhythm. And I’ve done it so much now that I built the habit where I’m. It’s funny. I’ve actually had the experience of walking away from my computer 60 seconds before it went black with no alert whatsoever, just habitually, I’ve the rhythm of my brain and my body is now knowing when just about 50 minutes is up. Yeah.

Zack Arnold: But going back to toggle, I now am at the point where knowing that the human brain is really only capable of three to four hours of highly focused, intense work, unless it’s a crazy busy day. I don’t have more than four hours of real, actual, genuine work over the course of a day. I’m at work all day long, but a lot of that is just doing other less creatively intense things because I know that I have a limited capacity. Toggle is how I’m able to track that, and then the other one. If somebody is thinking, “Ooh, I would really love to know, am I being productive? Am I wasting my time? But I don’t want to manually track everything. There’s another app that’s also free called Rescue Time.

Natalie Boschan: Oh yeah. And this

Zack Arnold: Is one that you forget is running. It’s kind of like if you’re going to be on a reality TV show and you think, “Oh my God, I’m going to know the cameras are there, but indefinitely, everybody just forgets the cameras are there, and it becomes something that your brain phases out. And that’s what rescue time does. Rescue time tracks the amount of time you spend on all of your apps and on websites. So at the end of the day, it will tell you this is how much time you spent on Facebook, this is how much time you spent in Avid, this is how much time you were in Apple Mail versus Gmail, and you can look at and you could say, holy crap, I was at work for 13 hours a day, and I was only an avid for three hours. What in the world was I doing? But it’s a really good wake-up call, and I’m a huge believer in quantifying things to establish a baseline for your behavior, so you can prove it. Do I think you should quantify everything for life? Absolutely not. But if you’re thinking I’m spending so much time at work, and I just don’t feel productive, and I’m so exhausted at the end of the day. Why try quantifying it? It’s free. Spend some time on toggle. Spend some time with rescue time, and figure out what does your day actually look like. And you went through this and saw that.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, and that’s the another thing about just taking your day back. Because yeah, when you get to the end of the day, like if I got to the end of the day and I barely only did dailies like a couple of sound scenes. I’m like, I don’t know what I did with like. There’s got to be a better way than this. Like, this is not the amount of this is not that much work to have spent 10 hours on. Like, there’s no way I actually worked for 10 hours. And when you start quantifying it that way, you start realizing that if you’re only doing three hours of work, you might as well do it in a specified time. Like you might as well, you might as well be the one controlling when that time is, as opposed to always being distracted, going on Facebook, going back and forth, and then that’s part of what tires you out is having to switch tasks like that all the time, like Facebook, email, GChat, phone, texts, this, that, like you can’t, you just can’t work. Well, well, you definitely can’t work as efficiently, but you just you get less tired by the end of the day, and you feel better. And I’ll

Zack Arnold: Go one step further. They have researched this phenomenon because we’ve realized that the brain is not capable of multitasking. The brain is capable of switching from one task to another very quickly, which is what people think is multitasking. Right. I believe the number is like three to 5% of people have some unique thing in their brain that actually allows them to multitask. The other vast majority of people, if you think I’m great at multitasking, no, you’re not. Your brain doesn’t do it. You’re very good at switching tasks quickly. However, science has also proven that if you switch tasks back and forth constantly, your productivity drops by 30%

Natalie Boschan: Yeah,

Zack Arnold: Even if you think you are going back and forth quickly, the amount of time you’re losing having to switch tasks adds up dramatically over the course of the day, which is why time blocking works so well because you’re not forcing your brain to do this thing that it doesn’t want to do, which is also why you get more done in less time, and you walk away thinking I actually have energy to have a life tonight.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah. Well, and when you look at the day and you think you’ve only done three hours of work, but you spent 10 hours there, you’re like, what? What? How did that? Like, how am I not taking away? How am I only getting this much done? Like how how do how do I justify not being home at a decent hour because I’m at work doing three hours of total work? Like how do I make? How do you? It’s hard to make that justification when you finally realize how much work, like real productive good work, you get done in a day, and to say that you’re not getting, you can’t get home until nine. I mean, yes, we’ve said there. There are definitely days you can’t get home until 9o’clock You get eight hours of dailies that need to get cut in two days. Yeah, you can’t do that. But on a normal day, there’s no reason not to get home early. There’s no reason to stay at work because what you’re flipping back and forth to Facebook like. I don’t enjoy Facebook that much to not have time to be home with my husband and see my friends and be able to talk to family who live far away. So, knowing all of that, I would much rather just not be on Facebook for my 50 minutes and go home at a normal time and be a person.

Zack Arnold: Yep, and that all comes back again to the why.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah,

Zack Arnold: It’s not well. I don’t want to be on Facebook because I shouldn’t right now. It’s well, I’m on Facebook. That means I’m going to be here longer, and I’m going to see my husband or my significant other less, or my kids. And then your philosophy starts to change. You start to filter things through that why, and without even realizing it, you start making better choices that add up over time and accumulate. You do more and more things that are good for you, and all of a sudden you say, “Wow, this day isn’t nearly as hard as it used to be, and it’s a very weird experience. I’ve had that experience where I would say, “Wait a second, I’m not exhausted at the end of the day. I don’t hate myself, and I have the energy to do other creative things outside of my job. Who am I? Yeah, like I’ve I’ve literally had that thought in my head, and I just realized that it was by making all these tiny little changes and decisions, but not all at once, just one at a time.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, it’s it’s really hard to do all this stuff all at once. You can’t like this. Is for me. This has been what I started in 2012. Is when I started to just pick up running again, and now it’s 2016. Like that’s four years to get to this point. So I mean, you know, I took a break and back and forth. How do I do this? But that still took. That’s a four-year journey, and I didn’t realize I’d get to this point. You know, I I was looking to feel this way, but I didn’t realize what it would take or how long it would take and what it would actually feel like again. But it’s yeah, it doesn’t. It takes it takes a long time. But that’s right. That’s how you you eat an elephant one by one at a time.

Zack Arnold: So the last two quick questions.

Natalie Boschan: Okay.

Zack Arnold: The first one is: We’ve been talking all about your goal time, but we haven’t actually mentioned to people how long it took you to finish the LA Marathon this year.

Natalie Boschan: Oh yeah, 350-six

Zack Arnold: So you did it. I did it. Meet your goal time.

Natalie Boschan: I made it. I did it. I had a I had a mini freakout the day before where so when you run a long race like this, they’ll have some event. Clif Bar had these bracelets where you have your time on there. You have your pace, so it tells you what time you need to be at at each mile. So they have the list of the miles and they have the list of times, and you can check your. I’m supposed to be at 10, whatever during this mile or 16 something or other mile two, I had these. So I got like a 330-five bracelet, three hours 30-five minute, and a 340-five bracelet, and I was staring at them for like a good 20 minutes, just staring at them, being like, “Can I do it? Can I do it? Can I do it? I can do this. I could do this, and I wore both, and I kept I kept making the 330-five time. I kept making the three. I was like, I’m making it. I’m getting three because 330-five for my age group is qualifying for Boston, and I was like, I could do this. I could do this. I could do this, but my friend, my trainer, my good friend, I’ve been mentioning, she’s like, don’t go out too fast. I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know. It’s going to be really long. She’s like, just don’t go out too fast, and you’ll be fine. I was like, I can do that. I can go out normal pace. I’ll be fine. Nope, I went out my first 5K, so eight minute miles, which was stupid. But I was trying to get around the crowd, all that. But yeah, and I just kept making these pace markers on the 335 bracelet, and I was like, I’ve got this in the bag. I will do this, but then at mile 16, I was just I just died. I said nope, and yeah, that’s what happens when you decide to fly too close to the sun. So mile like 16 or 16 and a half to 25 I was like, why did I do this? Why is any of this happening? This was a terrible idea. Why did I go so fast? She told me not to go so fast, and I’m sitting here thinking I could do 3:35. What’s wrong with me? So you get it in your own head, and it’s terrible. But then at like mile 25, I think the timer said it was at 3:45, and I was like, “Well, there is a good chance I might not make this if I’m gonna sit here and continuously complain, and so I was just like, I gotta do this. I just gotta do it. So I got side. I don’t know. I dug down really deep and found some energy somewhere, and I think my last mile was like a nine something, or I made it to the 356 mark. But yeah, and at the end of it, I was like, I just this this whole this like older woman. She’s like, do you need help? And I’m like, so I’m like, I’m like on the verge of tears. Like, yes, I think so. She’s like, okay, I’ll walk with you. And she’s walking with me, and I just start bawling. I’m like, I can’t do it anymore. Oh, so silly. Again, and she’s like, okay, I’ll just leave you here then. I’m like, okay. So then I wandered off. And then by the end of it, I was like, I really need to do that again. I really need to do that again and do better. Like that was that was my that was the end of the race. I was like, I can’t I can’t do this anymore. I think I could do better next time. I really think I could do better next time. I’m gonna do this right. So I’m gonna try to do it again in October.

Zack Arnold: And what is the plan?

Natalie Boschan: Well, I want to do the Chicago Marathon if one I can get off work. No, I probably will be able to. I want to do the Chicago Marathon, but you have to enter a lottery to get in that. So hopefully, I make my my number or my application gets drawn, and I can do that in October. I have plenty of time to train for that. Maybe a half marathon in there somewhere. 10k trail running sounds like fun. I got all kinds of stuff. I gotta I gotta hone in on what I actually want to do, but I think definitely a half and a 10k in between now and then, and we’ll see what else. Oh, and I got a Spartan race that I gotta do, a Spartan sprint in September, and I’m trying to find a Spartan Beast, so I get my trifecta, but there aren’t any available that aren’t in September. But if I’m doing a marathon in October, I can’t do that. So that’s my plan. That’s my year.

Zack Arnold: Certainly sounds ambitious.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah.

Zack Arnold: Well, I think the takeaway is for anybody thinking, well, I want to get in better shape, and I want to change my health, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day. I just can’t make it happen. Like enough, it can be done. You just have to be willing to dig deeper, find out why it’s important to you, take the time to rearrange your day, make some sacrifices. You may have to watch a little less TV. You may have to surf the web a little bit less. You may not be able to check CNN.com 14 times a day, but if these are things that are important to you, it can be done because you just trained for and ran a marathon in under four hours, being the assistant editor on one of the most bad crazy shows on television. And no, I’m not going to censor that.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, that’s yep, that’s a

Zack Arnold: So it can be done. You just need the systems and the knowledge, and most importantly, your why. You find that everything else will fall into place. So, thank you very, very much for being so candid with your story. And I hope this inspires other people to just take some action. It doesn’t have to be a marathon; it could be a 5K, but whatever it is, I hope you realize that you can do it. It can be done, and it may not be as awful or miserable as you think. But it’s going to take a little effort and a little bit of knowledge to get you there.

Natalie Boschan: Or it might be, but then you can do it again. No, yeah. Or it can be completely and totally owl,

Zack Arnold: And then you realize I want to do this again.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, but you can do better. You could. It could not be terrible the next time around. That’s improvement.

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