(It’s a good thing) Old Habits Die Hard
Last week I fell into the black hole of despair. My fitness routine fell in right after me. You may know how it is. First you skip a day or two of workouts to a lie in bed and think. Then you start eating all the wrong things. Which, of course, makes you feel terrible when you wake up in the morning, so you shut off your alarm and go back to bed for another hour. Or two. Before you know it, a week’s gone by and you haven’t done anything healthy for yourself.
But one morning you notice the empty family size bag of Julio’s in the trash (which would be fine, if you had a family). And, maybe worse, you notice something sparkly on your shoelaces when you accidentally kick a lone running shoe that got wedged under the couch—and the sparkle is not a diamond but the intricate web of a spider that’s taken over your shoe.
OK, you tell yourself. Crawl out of the hole. It’s time to run.
This week, I got back into the swing of things. My goals were small:
- Do NOT hit snooze. Get up at the usual time: 5 am.
- Do something strenuous every morning. Moving the party size vat of ice cream from one freezer shelf to another does not count as strenuous. Either run or strength train.
- Remind yourself why you make healthy choices in the first place. Because it feels good. I promise.
The hardest part about resuming a habit is in the mind. It takes more effort to convince myself to move than it does to actually move. Mentally, I have to argue with myself every morning, find the right argument to ignite the chain of events that become exercise. Physically, my body knows what to do. I just have to set it in motion, and it goes. The force of habit propels my joints, muscles, limbs to perform familiar actions.
Thank God for muscle memory, for the pattern of movement we build into our bodies. If my feet didn’t know their way down the road, I’d likely still be lying in bed.
More Than Running... 
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