Zero to Hero: Week 1 – Staying Motivated

I haven’t run since my race in mid October, and I hadn’t run before that for about a week and a half, so I’ll put this in the books as my baseline stats. Due to some other seemingly more enjoyable activities, I only got out to run twice (more on this below) this past week. My only real concern is some calf/shin pain that I’ve dealt with for quite some time, which I believe is due to lack of running form, or ill fitting shoes, or most likely both.

Science and the internet told me that it takes ten weeks to form a habit. I have never even come close to running that consistently. As I mentioned, I’ve run three times in the past month. I clearly see the need to keep at it, but I’m too apathetic. Last week, bonding with my Xbox and generally not doing anything sounded far better than exerting myself and training. By all means, I should feel motivated to train- I’m spending hundreds upon hundreds of dollars to fly out and participate in a marathon next year. I may as well eat my money if I’m going to go in unprepared. So what’s the deal?

The big problem is that running isn’t fun yet. It hurts, it’s tiring, and it takes up a part of my day that was once used for winding down from work, preparing dinner, and being great at video games. For now, I feel like I need to take my mind off of running whilst running. Therefore, this week, I’m trying three new tactics to see if I can’t muster up some more initiative-

• Audiobooks- Music can get boring when I listen to the same playlist time and time again. I’m going to stick to an audiobook, and only listen while I run. Hopefully, if it’s a good book, I’ll want to keep running!
• Race people I don’t know via MapMyRun - MapMyRun has a fantastic mobile app that uses GPS to track distance, speed, and elevation. You can create your own ‘courses,’ and share them on their online community. Once these courses are posted, you can load them onto your device, run them, and post your time on each course’s respective leader board. A bit of anonymous competition can inspire me to train harder, as well as mix up the routes I run!
• Reward each run with an activity I enjoy – I hereby vow not to play Assassins Creed 3 unless I have gone out to run that day. No seriously. I voweth it. I don’t know if Microsoft is big brothery enough to track game playing to that extent, but if they are, I will post data in the effort of ethical internet journalism.

Shoes!

Happy trails!