Becoming A Runner

Three months ago I decided to follow what seemed then a somewhat crazy whim. I decided after decades of wanting to run a marathon, it was finally time to get training. I’ve tried to become a runner countless times but each time, bit off more than I could chew initially. (I should be able to go from not running 10 feet to running 3 miles in a week, right? Wrong.) The last time I attempted running -about five years back – I did pretty well until knee pain reared its ugly head about two months in. I reluctantly hung up my old tired running shoes (no doubt, I realize now, the primary cause of my patellofemoral pain syndrome flare-up at the time) and went to ice my knees. To make matters worse, I was also in the midst of the worst relationship of my life – but that’s another story for another day.

The point is, I spent a good portion of my adult life wanting to run but every time I got the urge to run, I quickly squashed that idea with an assumption that I couldn’t run. While my desire to run never went away, with time, my assumption that it was something I couldn’t do started to fade away. A little over a year ago I realized I wasn’t ready to give up on my dream of running a marathon.

It was time to give running another go, but this time I didn’t want to fail. I knew from past experience that lacing up the closest thing to running shoes I currently had on hand (usually a beat up pair of Adidas) and heading out the door with some half-ass plan of eventually being able to run 26.2 miles just wasn’t going to work. I needed a solid plan. I need structure. I needed to stay injury free. So before I went on my first run this spring I made sure I had:

• New, but broken in, running shoes. Because I know my body has a predisposition for knee pain, I opted for well-reviewed motion control shoes.
• A training plan.
• A goal: Chicago Marathon 2015. 

I used the above training plan for the Color Run to great success. I liked that the plan includes running in the very first week, that it used time rather than mileage to track the running/walking ratio, and that it worked to slowly build up strength, endurance and confidence. Had I set out on day one to run half an hour (or even just fifteen – okay, even five- minutes) I likely would have failed, but by week 8 of following the training plan three days a week, I was totally ready to run 30 minutes without stopping. No big deal.

I’ve spent a lot of time wishing I was a runner and truth be told, even after I finished up the eight week training plan, I felt more like a person who could run rather than a runner. It wasn’t until I went for a run during crafting weekend because I couldn’t imagine going four days without running that I realized, hey, look at that: I’m a runner. And like that my dream of running a marathon turned into a goal.

I credit my success this go around in large part to my advance preparations. I’m also still reaping the rewards from the lessons I learned from reading The Willpower Instinct.

 This past Saturday, I ran six miles without stopping. SIX miles. Running anything more than a 5K seemed downright impossible just three months ago. I’m not speedy by any stretch of the imagination, but I am out there. I am doing this thing.

Now I wonder if my goal of running the Chicago Marathon in 2015 was too modest. In truth, I think I’ll be ready to run a decent distance long before October 2015 and so I’ve been working towards an alternative (albeit somewhat smaller goal) of running a local half marathon next May.

As corny as this will sound, you really can make a habit of doing the impossible. Whatever your goal is, whether it’s running a marathon, writing a novel, paying off your student debt, or whatever, you can get there with a plan, a will, and a large dose of consistency.
 

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Enter Michelle Obama arms

Some people find the end of winter depressing. I am not one of them.

My heart sings at the sight of mucky roads, crystalline snow, and water dripping from rain gutters. I welcome the lengthening days with open arms, knowing they hold the promise of green sprouts, moving water, and a chance to shed my many layers of wool, down, and fleece for more form fitting outfits. 

Wait . . . . What? Form fitting outfits? HORROR!

It's a well known fact that I put on about five pounds in butter weight each winter. I don't worry about it too much. As butter is apt to do, those pounds melt in the heat of summer. Since reaching adulthood, my weight's always yo-yoed a bit - never enough to make my BMI a concern, or even to change my dress size. So each spring, there's a little pudge that needs to be redistributed, or rather, evaporated. It's fine.

But over the last couple years, I've grown lackadaisical in my workouts. Time once spent doing crunches and lifting dumbbells has been reallocated to other pursuits. Since apparently my word of the year is "willpower," I knew getting back in better shape needed to be a goal for 2013.

There were a myriad of factors that lead to me dusting off the dumbbells last week:

At my annual physical earlier this month, the clinic scale displayed a number five pounds heavier than I was expecting, even for a mid-February weigh in;

The shimmy into freshly laundered jeans had become more a "suck in gut and yank";

My knee pain (which comes from having muscles that are too weak to keep my knee where it's supposed to be) flared up slightly last month;

and I'd seen maybe one too many inspirational fitness pins:

Source: Uploaded by user via Ada on Pinterest

So last week I finally stopped pretending that my daily walk to the mailbox and hauling in firewood totally had me covered for cardio and strength training (although both activities certainly weren't hurting with my fitness) and got down and did the gut-busting ab workout I picked up in an issue of Sports Illustrated for Women way back when. (I loved that magazine . . .so much better than today's Prevention and Health, which seem to discuss self-tanner application tips more than they discuss actual female athletes. *sigh*) Then the next day I put myself through a series of upper and lower body exercises. 

I'm not going to lie. It hurt like a dickens. Today's the first day that I haven't felt achy and sore and that's just because I took yesterday off and haven't gotten around to today's exercises yet. (As soon as I finish this post, I swear. . .) 

While displeasure with my body's appearance is usually what prompts me to pick up the weights again, there are so many reasons for women to strength train, besides a better looking body. Lifting weights 2-3 times a week results in a higher metabolism, lessened risk of osteoporosis, lower blood pressure, and better heart health, just to name a few benefits. That's reason enough for me to keep at the old dumbbells even after this pudge is gone. Yet we women tend to gravitate towards power walking and the elliptical machine when we think about getting fit. Cardio's all well and good, but we miss out on a lot if we neglect our weight lifting.

As a member of the girl power generation, I take pride in being strong. It's empowering to be able to open your own salsa jars or pull yourself out of the lake onto a dock with using the ladder. To me, it's worth a bit of sweat equity to stay proud of this body that's my home for my entire life.

So here I go again. Lifting the weights, doing the lunges, crunching the tummy. I'm not stopping until my arms look like this:

Come on springtime. I'll be ready for you!
 

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Where There's A Will . . .

I started out the new year with some of the most stereotypical reading material ever. In the early days of January, I churned through Kelly McGonigal's The Willpower Instinct, learning all the mind games we play on ourselves and how we frequently derail our best intentions. In the book, McGonigal encourages the reader to take on a willpower challenge to test out the concepts and ideas she introduces about the science and psychology of willpower.

We all have behaviors and habits we wish we didn't and thinking of a willpower challenge is less than challenging for most of us. For me, my default willpower challenge has always been procrastination. I frequently find myself scrolling through Facebook and Pinterest when I'm meant to be doing something else. So inspired by McGonigal's writings and since, it was a new year and all, I made the resolution to stop procrastinating so much. (Oh stop laughing you.) I also wanted to consistently get up at a time I deemed "a decent hour" on workdays.

And here we are, nearly at the end of the first month of 2013, at a time when the vast majority of New Year's resolutions have already been broken. And I'm proud to say that I'm still hard at work on my willpower challenges.

The getting up at a decent hour (which I declare is 7 . . . working from home is rough ;) actually turned out to be a cinch. When I realized the weather station that sits on shelving units around the corner from our bedroom door has an alarm, I simply started setting the alarm each night. When it goes off in the morning, I'm forced out of bed to turn off the alarm. And because I really don't care for the groggy sprint out the bedroom door to the buzzing alarm, I tend to wake up a couple minutes ahead of the alarm. Best of all, because I know I'm getting up at the same time each morning, I've started going to bed at a more consistent time too.  

But my procrastination willpower challenge is a whole 'nother beast. By being mindful of my habits and tendencies, I realized last week that I don't actually have a procrastination problem. Nowadays, I actually do get the vast majority of the things I'll say I'll do done. (Chalk up that one to growing older.)

What I lack is focus. (Oh look . . . shiny!)

I've always felt like I have a procrastination problem because I never manage to finish everything I think I should get done, even if I am finishing what I have to get done. 

So what's getting in between me and accomplishment? Oh, I don't know . . . maybe my penchant for having a gazillion windows open both on my desktop and in Firefox, which I flip between absentmindedly all the while I'm convincing myself that I'm doing something useful like writing a blog post or researching an article? Maybe the fact that I respond like one of Pavlov's dogs whenever I hear the "new email" chime?  

So as we move into February, I'm retuning my willpower challenge a bit. It turns out my procrastination problem can fix itself if I learn to tune out distractions and focus solely on each individual task I lay out before me.

In her series on handmade businesses back in October, Gussy Sews suggested that you only check twice a day. At the time, I found the idea horrifying. But I need to check my email all day, I thought. I need to respond to some emails asap. But really, whether I respond to an email within three minutes or three hours usually makes little to no difference.

My email doesn't need to be churning around in the background. In fact, I think this is a habit I picked up during my temp days as an administrative assistant. I often found myself with very little to fill my workdays. Having Outlook open at all times on my desktop gave me an allusion of purpose, even if, as a temp worker,  the only emails I got a regular basis were approvals of the week before's timecard.(Habits can be so silly when you get to the root of them.)

I'll be limiting my email checking in the coming weeks and I'll also be trying to cut back on my mindless internet surfing and we'll see how it goes.

The thing is, you never conquer your willpower habit. Sure, it might become an ingrained habit, but in truth, every single morning we are starting our willpower challenges all over again. Every day we have a choice to live up to the expectations we've set for ourselves to meet our long term goals, or we can choose the easier route with faster rewards. It's not easy conquering our willpower challenges, but it's most definitely worth it.


Did you make any new year's resolutions? If so, how are you doing with them? How do you stay focused?
 

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