If You’re Trying, You’re Doing Just Fine

Look, I get it, starting a new habit is hard. You won’t be perfect. Or you will be perfect by putting an incredible amount of pressure on yourself to be perfect all the time. The reality is you’re breaking away from your past habits and your whole life is built around those past habits. Rebuilding your life around desirable habits can be hard, particularly if the people around you aren’t use to your new habits and would rather not see you do something good for yourself either because it messes with their habits or it makes them feel like they are now falling short of the new norm you are setting. You must persist. And you will have days that for one reason or another you fall shot of your goal. Don’t let that turn into two days, keep coming back. Don’t feel shame, guilt, or failure for missing a run day or eating something you know you shouldn’t. Just come back to it as soon as you can. Self-improvement isn’t meant to make you feel worse.

There is beauty in knowing that you haven’t done everything you can do. It leaves more challenges out there. Otherwise if you fulfill all the challenges, what’s left? Running is a great challenge for this because there are always more miles to run. In the television series ‘Lost’ there was a capsule where a code had to be typed in daily and if it wasn’t typed in the world would explode or something like that. Use that as a visual for your daily exercise, except if you don’t do it the world won’t explode, you just need to come back to it again the next day. My personal challenge in the new year is to get my run out of the way early. As in, my alarm goes off at 5:30 and I want my Strava to have started before 6:00. Today I met that goal for the first time with a 5:57 start time. I’m looking to keep that up as my new habit. It produces a version of me that I like and can be proud of. That’s the goal. So keep it up, no matter where you are on the path, you’re doing great if you’re doing something, because trust me, you will keep doing more and more if you stick with it. You aren’t in a competition with anyone but your own will.

Now go get those miles!