You Choose Your Path; How Heavy it Can Be

Shame on me, for feeling guilty about every time I only ran a half-mile and squeaked out an abbreviated weight circuit. Shame on me for berating myself each week I was only able to fit in one or two workouts, instead of meeting my goal of three or four.

I've been making a lot of excuses since February, and let my workout routine lapse. After we got back from vacation at the beginning of June, I spent some focused time setting goals and outlined a new plan to get back into shape. I laid out an incremental series of cardio exercises to edge myself back up to my 2-mile run. I organized my list of weight-lifting exercises by the muscle groups they activate, and created an order that would effectively give each group time to recover before they were focused on again. I created a system to track my progress, which, I know from experience, is key to motivating myself on this front.

All of this background is to explain why and how I've been tracking my workouts intently over the past month, and to give context to an epiphany I had reviewing my data. (I know I'm a nerd. Live and let live.)

For the last three years, I've been tracking my outside workouts with an app that uses my phone's GPS to record distances, and keeps track of my speed. Looking up some details about my paces that had been recently recorded, I figured out that I have tracked 291 activities, averaging 1.87 mi each. I've tracked a total of 423 miles in 3 years!

I know it doesn't hold a candle to someone training for a race, or keeping serious fitness as their priority, but for me? That is a lot of sacred minutes I have put in out on the path. Time I've gotten to spend in my own head, up against my own fears and frustrations and irritations.

It's like Jeff Olsen's Slight Edge principle, you're either moving forwards or backwards - even if it's in tiny little incremental steps. I wouldn't have traveled those 423 miles if I had succumbed to the pressures of a busy schedule and the yearning for sleep. Even on the days I dragged myself out of bed later than I intended and rushed through a shorter run than I wanted, I was making progress.

So the next time I feel inadequate, I hope I can stop feeling guilty about things I haven't accomplished, and remember how far each step forward has brought me.