For the past week or two, I’ve been attempt­ing to get into the habit of run­ning. It’s been pretty good so far. I’ve suc­cess­fully made it past the first sev­eral days of pain and still kept going. This itself, is a remark­able achieve­ment for me.

There are a couple of things that have been moti­vat­ing me. There are the over­all benifits of run­ning. I’d like to be in better shape. I’d also like to quit smok­ing (the idea is that run­ning will help this process). This doesn’t always cut it as far as moti­va­tion goes though, so I find myself employ­ing a kind of back­wards logic to get myself going.

There’s two thoughts in my head every morn­ing that have been enabling to get up and run:

1. On any given day, I can think of an excuse not to run. Whether the excuse is that it’s too cold, it’s snow­ing or that I have a hang­over, it doesn’t matter. The fact that I can always dream up an excuse makes all excuses invalid.
2. At this point I’m only run­ning about a mile. So, no matter how ter­ri­ble it is, I can be assured that the tor­ture will be over in no more than 15 min­utes. It truly would be sad not to be able to sub­ject myself to 15 min­utes of phys­i­cal exer­tion.

So far, this kind of strange logic has been suc­cess­ful enough in get­ting me to actu­ally run. The past couple of days though…I’ve been seri­ously lack­ing in moti­va­tion. Yes­ter­day I bagged it com­pletely with­out even trying to jus­tify it. I just decided I wasn’t going to run. Today, I found it very dif­fi­cult to run as well.

When I woke up this morn­ing, I could just tell that it was cold out. It was also very windy. I could feel my house shud­der­ing with each gust of wind. For the record, it’s this cold:

What kind of crazy person would will­ingly sub­ject them­selves to run­ning in that? I knew that noth­ing short of an extra­or­di­nary effort would get me to run today. What can I say, I’m stubborn.

The Solution

I hap­pened to be bor­row­ing one of my friend’s car. I needed to return it to her house today, which involved dri­ving it there and then walk­ing home. As pointed out before, it’s cold out. Why would I want to walk home from her house? I had this great idea, I should drive to her house, ditch the car, then run home. Once I was there, I’d have to get home some­how. If it’s cold out, all the more reason to run instead of walk.

I pro­ceeded with the plan. After I parked the car and got out, I quickly real­ized that per­haps this was not such a great idea. I very nearly got back into the car and drove home. But then there would still be the prob­lem of having to leave the car at her house at some point. There was noth­ing to do but run.

And run I did. I ran very fast. It was very cold. I didn’t even think about stop­ping until I was at my doorstep. The entire time, I had the very real sense that if I stopped run­ning, I die. After all, I was only wear­ing run­ning attire, not the normal winter bundles.

So, after this morning’s exper­i­ment, I have come to real­ize that the key to find­ing the moti­va­tion to run is as simple as just find­ing a way to acti­vate your sur­vival instinct.

Now that I’m with­out the whole car thing, I just have to figure out some­thing for tomorrow…