#FlyWashington Magazine Winter 2019 | Page 12

Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb on NBC’s TODAY Credit: NBC THEY (TRY TO) STAY HEALTHY As much as Guthrie once thrived on running, she admits that she’s not always religious about it anymore. “I definitely feel like exercise is, for me, always the first thing to go; it’s the first thing to drop,” she admits. “I’m not one of those people that loves to exercise, or even feels like, ‘Oh, I have to exercise, or I don’t feel good.’ I want to do it. I know I should do it. So, I do try to do it. But for example, I don’t think I’ve done any actual real exercise in weeks.” She says that her fitness level varies based on how busy things are with work and her kids. Sound familiar? Besides running, she says there have been times that she’s been passionate about dance cardio and aerobics, too. “But I’m like anybody, sometimes I’m into it, and sometimes I’m not,” she discloses. Kotb agrees. She has it in her calendar to run every day at 4 pm with her daughters and FLYWASHINGTON.COM 10 WINTER 2019/20 their stroller, but admits that she’s only done it once. “I feel like, sometimes you have to realize you can’t be everything for everybody, and so you just do the best you can,” she says. But if there’s anyone for whom she wants to be everything, it’s for the kids, who are both under age three. She says that she used to work out for herself, to feel good but now she says it’s because she wants to be there for her girls. “I’m not doing it just so ‘Oh, can I fit into my stupid size 10 dress?’ which is getting harder. I want to do it so that 10 years from now, I am on the floor still active with those kids.” She doesn’t take for granted the fact that she was able to become a mom later in life. She compares the delight she feels with her little family to when Bonnie Raitt won her first Grammy and declared that it took her 40 years to become an overnight sensation: “I feel like Bonnie Raitt times 10 — like how Kotb’s new book, I Really Needed This Today someone would feel when you wait so long for something, and then you can’t believe you have it. It’s not lost on me for one minute that I get the privilege of raising two children. I’m not going to waste or squander my time. It’s an amazing thing I get to do.”