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LOL

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Some people want to do it because they know they “should”, but I think most of us are like I was and want to do it to lose weight

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I had this idea of where I wanted to be at body-wise and thought running would take me there

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So many times I remember saying, “Ok, starting tomorrow, I’m going to run EVERY DAY!”

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I’d do all the things people recommended:

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Laying out my running clothes the night before

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Psyching myself up

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Thinking about how AWESOME I would look in 6 months

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And then tomorrow would come and I would run!

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“Yes! This is amazing! My life is changed forever!”

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I was exhausted, don’t get me wrong, but I was like, “I’m an Olympian!”

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LOL

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Thumbs down people

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I would run for a few days in a row and then I’d be like, “Yeah… I guess I don’t have to run EVERY day, that’s not really realistic.”

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And then the next day would come and I’d be like, “Ok, I slept in today, no worries, I’ll get back on tomorrow.”

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And then tomorrow, “Yeah forget this.”

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LOL

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I wouldn’t have that staying power you know?

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I was relying on MOTIVATION instead of getting to the real nitty gritty of building a habit

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And then the self-hate would come on

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“You’re always going to be fat”

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“You can’t even stick to an exercise routine for a week, what’s wrong with you?”

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“You should just give up”

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And you know what?

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It wasn’t until years later that I realized what I had to do

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Have you ever heard the saying, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”?

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And when you think about it, it’s a single step at a time the whole way there!

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So, in my mind, I thought that if I could break down my larger goal (of running a mile every day) into a bunch of smaller goals (like slowly increasing the amount of time I ran) then I’d be on track to reaching my larger goal

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What that meant for me was starting off running just THIRTY SECONDS each day!

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Does that embarrass you just hearing that??

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Now, think about this for a second

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Would someone going on a long journey be embarrassed to take their first step, as if they felt like they should be 100 steps in by now?

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No way!

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They would just start walking

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So that’s where I started

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The entire first week, I only ran for 30 seconds each day

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The second week, I ran for a minute, the third week was a minute and a half, and so on

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Eventually, I was running a mile every morning!

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Now why did that work?

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The breakdown of slowly increasing my time was the tactic, but what was the principle behind it?

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It’s all about keeping promises to yourself