Show up

I read somewhere that Woody Allen once said. "Ninety percent of success is showing up." I wasn't trying to find out how to be successful and I'm not sure I'd take advice from Woody Allen although he can be humorous. I do think being funny is important. It's hard to be happy if you're goal is to keep a straight, serious face all the time. You need to practice the art of smiling and if there is someone that can help do that for you, it's a plus.

Sometimes you need to rely on yourself. I was struggling with myself yesterday. I had a 5 miler scheduled. I was freezing all afternoon at work. The outside weather was horrendous. I was visualizing my options dwindling from running outside to facing the use of the treadmill at the gym. I could tell my mind was wanting to figure out how to recalculate when to run.

I knew when to run. It had to be that day. It's a schedule with little room for variation and let's face it, I'm only on week two. Mess up already? But my mind was giving it a rethink. Options: 1) Run outside-nope. 2) Run at gym-eehh. 3) Don't run-looking better. Option three was coming at me full-force. Then I thought again. If option 3) Don't run was fitting into place, than anything would be better than option 3.

I knew I recorded an hour long show on my DVR I hadn't watched yet. What if I ran at home while watching the show with all commercials? That would be an hour. And no, I don't have a treadmill but running in place is something, right? It would be the anything is better than option 3, right?

It's what I did. It took me an hour 15 minutes to get my 5 miles. You just can't get any pace speeds running in place. I gained a lot of ground during commercials when I would actually run through the house. Thankfully, there wasn't anyone else home, and that last half mile sped away as I actually moved from bedroom to kitchen to lapping the living room into the den and back and then back again. Commercials were my life savers because I got to actually move instead of kicking up my knees with no forward motion.

I will go to the gym today to run my scheduled 3 miler. It will be a breeze and I bet my pace will be awesome. It's ridiculous to run in place for 5 miles but I can say I got it done. You have to get outside your mental box sometimes to realize the other options aren't so bad. And I think I was at least ninety percent successful since I found a funny way to show up. I'm counting it.
TT