By day, Areva Martin is an award-winning attorney and both a founding and managing partner at one of LA’s top law firms, Martin & Martin. Her legal expertise makes her a highly sought after media personality, with appearances on CNN, The Doctors, MSNBC and Good Morning America, just to name a few.
By day, Martin is also a leading voice in autism advocacy. Through her nonprofit, Special Needs Network, Martin has raised millions of dollars for autism and provided services to more than 35,000 families, making SNN California’s premiere grassroots autism organization. She is also a wife, mother of three, sisterfriend and a host of other daily roles that could fall into the category of ‘I’m every woman.’
Her days, if you couldn’t tell, are extremely long. But surprisingly, the thing that sends her stress through the roof isn’t the 16 hours days, or the pressures that come with complex and high-profile cases. Just a few years ago, Martin discovered stress where most people go to relieve theirs: the gym.
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"One day I just went in there and said, 'I just hate this! I'm just gonna start walking in my own neighborhood,” Martin tells BlackDoctor.org in a recent interview.
Instead of fighting with traffic to get to the gym, dealing with the crowds and germs on the equipment, Martin took the advice of a good friend and traded the gym for the pavement.
Never the athletic type, she started slow. Walk a block. Run a block. Walk a block. Run a block.
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Making health a priority was something new. Martin confesses that like a lot of Black women she grew up in a household where they fried chicken, made macaroni and cheese, and there wasn't much emphasis on exercise or movement. She grew up on Grandma’s cooking, “and not focused on health.”
“For me I came to health and wellness I'll say as an adult after having had my kids and after having yo-yo'd back and forth with diets," Martin explains.
Now, roughly four years in, the star-power lawyer’s block walk is a full-fledged run. Running is her quiet time and her ‘ME’ time. The endurance she’s built up with years of running is what helps her meet the demands of her lifestyle and keep stress at bay.
"There's something about being out on the road and developing the patience that it takes to stack mile on top of mile that's teaching me a lot about patience in other situations."
With so many things pulling at her time and attention, Martin has found the trick to fitting exercise into her schedule is to not fit it in at all. Her work day starts officially with her run. Martins says she tells women all the time, “If you think about fitting exercise into your life you probably are gonna hit it and be successful maybe 20/30 percent of the time, but 60 to 70 percent of the time you're not going to be successful and that's what I did for years."
The game-changing shift, she says, happened when she stopped thinking about fitting exercise into her life and made it a part of her life.
If you follow her on Instagram or any of her popular social media pages, you’ll see she really is about that fit life. What started as way to track her progress and share her journey has now become a source of inspiration for women all over the country, which is a reward in itself.
"One of the biggest blessings and sources of gratification for me is women who I know struggle with their weight or struggle with being active saying from those posts they've been motivated and inspired to either get into a gym or get out and start walking or even running."
