It’s easier not doing the thing than doing the thing, whatever the thing happens to be for you in this very moment in time. It’s easier to pick up your phone and mindlessly scroll until the back of your neck is stiff and your eyeballs are bloodshot red and your vision is blurry or flop down on the couch or in an armchair and tap the remote and voila! the TV is on with an endless buffet of shows and series and movies of whatever it is you want to watch even if you don’t know what that is just yet because the algorithm and the cable networks will have something anything something you’ll land on even though after watching it you’re thinking to yourself, “Why did I just spend an hour watching that crap?”
I have this thought often of how not doing the thing is always easier than doing the thing when it comes to running or lifting weights or basically anything that involves exercise, not because I don’t enjoy exercising — I do — it’s just that I don’t enjoy starting the process of exercising. Once I’m in it, once I’m a mile-and-a-half down the road, I don’t hate running. But I do, admittedly, dread the first few steps of doing the thing.
The first mile-and-a-half of every run, my inner thoughts are going at me a hundred miles an hour saying things like f—k this I feel so old my achilles are on fire why are you doing this to yourself and so on and so forth until I’m too tired to think those thoughts and those thoughts just melt away and now thankfully yes I can just focus on my breathing and the next steps in front of me one after the other.
It’s been a month since I started back running and the honeymoon period where I was deep in love with the activity of running has worn off and now I’m back where a lot of people find themselves when they’re on the verge of quitting but not quite there at least not yet and so I have to tell myself, have to write it out like I’m doing now, that regardless of how hard or dreadful I find the beginning of the activity, I know that once I’m immersed in the activity and even after I’ve completed the activity, I never once think to myself, “Oh, I shouldn’t have done that.”
I’ve never once, well, I take that back: there was one time involving a microburst, that I’ve ever finished a run and said, “Whoa boy. Wish I’d have just stayed home today and eaten potato chips.”
Between the time I started writing this and the time it is now, I took a five mile run. It’s the most I’ve run since starting back and the longest since my hiatus going back to October. Once I got back to the house, I texted my wife, “Five miles! I did it.”
Depending on your level of physical activity, you’ll either think a five mile run is impressive or five miles is nothing because maybe you’re training for a marathon or something and I get it, I do, because five miles to me a few years ago was what I basically considered a light run day. But I’m inching closer to fifty years old than forty years old now and my beard is graying and I’ve got these gnarly knots growing on my knuckles because I’m of prime starting arthritis age so five miles for me is an achievement, especially so since I just started back running almost exactly a month ago today and I’ll take it. I will take my solo five mile run and build on it for next week when I shoot for a six mile run and who knows, maybe in a few weeks I’ll nab an eight mile run like the old days but maybe that’s just wishful thinking because when I was on mile four today I remember thinking, “Holy sh!t, I used to run twice this far pretty much every day once upon a time” and I can’t even fathom doing that distance now.
No matter what the future holds, the now is that:
I did the damn thing I didn’t necessarily want to do and I feel immensely better physically and mentally but especially mentally for having done it.
So I guess this is all a roundabout way of saying that if something is worth doing, in particular if that thing involves your physical health, then you should do it and not let that inner lazy bum inside you try to talk you out of it. You’ll feel better for having done the thing than not doing the thing. Doing the thing is naturally harder than not doing it. It’s supposed to be man. That makes it worth doing in the first place. Not doing it is always always the easy way out.
And when you do the damn thing it’s also a solid way of giving yourself guilt-free permission to now go lay on your behind and watch a movie and eat an entire pizza by yourself which is what I’m going to do right now even thought I really really really need to take a shower because man do I stink. Straight up stank in here.
Dig my writing? Get updates of new posts: