I went for a run this morning. At the gym, on the treadmill. It was 8 degrees when I woke up you see and because I'm no outdoor running-in-the-cold hero, I went to the gym.
As you all know, I'm a bit of a crabby-come-lately when it comes to running. Avoided it all my life until last year. I started doing it a little bit. Then doing more of it. Didn't take long to find out it was a walrus. I mean, didn't take long to find out that though it makes you want to puke while you do it, it makes you feel like $1 000 000 afterwards. For quite a while too. And it makes me (even) more punctual on account of my new willingness to run for trams.
Anyway, it's not all beer and skittles. i still dread it most days and my ability to do it depends on a series of tricks I play on myself.
My chief trick is to tell myself that I have no specific goal in mind with each run. Time, distance, speed- they're all up for grabs every time. This is because if I tell myself I'm going to run for 5 kms, I want to puke after 1 and the other 4 suck very badly. If I tell myself I will go for as log as I feel like, getting the first km under my belt ain't no thang. And getting to 5 sometimes ain't no thang so I keep going. Turns out my brain is a bit of a dumkopf so it tots ally buys every line I feed it.
My latest trick is to specify the number of songs I will listen to. I cover up the screen on the treadmill with the spotty jacket I bought at uniqlo in London so i cant see the time i've been running, or the distance. I just run for a specific number of songs and then stop. The first time I did it, I ended up running for 8kms, a big run for me. That's 10 songs. This morning, 10.3kms over12 songs!
Being an idiot is really useful sometimes.
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