getting buff

Monday, August 21, 2006

run o'clock

One of the things that I have to keep working on when changing to a healthy lifestyle is that I am changing my lifestyle, not myself. Whatever plans and decisions I make, it is still little ol' me who has to carry them out.

When I joined a gym previously, the only time I could really use the gym was in the morning before work. And I hate getting up early. So I resented the gym and hated it every morning when I went, and when I didn't enjoy it very much at the gym, it was easy to get out of the habit.

When I plan in my head what I am doing, it is tempting to schedule in a run or going to the gym at a time I should know is totally incompatible with my personality. Example. At the end of a long week I never feel like doing anything other than sitting on the couch. So I should have known better this week than to plan a run on Friday. I instructed Hub that I would get home from work, put the dinner on and nip out for a run while it was cooking. It was no surprise that I got home and welded my butt to the couch and didn't move.

There was a time when this would have filled me with guilt and started me on the road to self-recrimination and hand-wringing. But this time it was just a reminder that changing my lifestyle doesn't change my personality and it doesn't change the way that I tend to react to the demands on my lifestyle. It was a reminder that I never feel like exercising on Friday evenings, which is why that is scheduled as a rest day.

Similarly I know that I will rarely get up early to exercise, so I don't schedule exercise in the mornings. I know that although I am an obsessive list maker, any changes to my diet which depend on me tracking, counting, weighing or documenting will be commenced enthusiastically but will fail after a couple of weeks.

So on Saturday I wasn't too concerned when I began to think that I didn't really feel like going for a run that afternoon. But after a little while when it got to about that time on Saturday afternoon when I normally head out, I began to get an itching to go. It was run o'clock. So I headed out for a particularly exhausting dog relay. It's a special workout that requires you have three dogs and the inclination to only run with one of them at a time. The changeovers are a killer.

3 Comments:

Morning exercise - arrrgghgh! I sometimes get out for a morning run but it's always an effort.
So very true, if ya gotta get too far outa the comfort zone it 'aint gonna happen :-)

I always run straight after work because I know once I get home it's definitely butt on couch time.
I know what you mean, I could never miss a Body Step class because I knew I would be staring at the clock feeling irritable the whole time the class was on. My running times are a bit more random now, so I don't really have a "Run O Clock", I plan on getting into the habit of running in the mornings when I've moved though as BB is a morning runner. I actually quite like the mornings, it means I sleep well at night and there's nothing quite like the lovely smug feeling you get from knowing that you have run 10k before most people have even hit the snooze button on their alarms clocks ;-)

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