So, today I completed my 7 years in running. This day, the first of January is the day when I took up a resolution in the year 2018 to wake up in the morning and do something about my fitness.
My fitness was failing me miserably. I was in deep s#$& physically and psychologically. I was under a lot of stress. My blood pressure was shooting through the roof. I had been just diagnosed with the problem of piles.
On family front, I was battling a host of issues. My father had just passed away which actually triggered everything else in my life. I was overly concerned about how my mom is gonna take it. I had my younger kid just 6 months old who needed all my care.
While I was going down and remained in deep silence for 3 years before I could come to a conclusion that I needed to do something to disrupt my life and turn it in the right direction. When I look back today, I realise that energy that was with me to lift me out of all the mess my life jad become.
I made a visit to my alma mater and attended a school reunion meet consisting of my school mates from the batch of 1994. I came back and started wondering what I could do to bring sunshine back into my life. And I landed on the idea about doing something to my health which was really tearing ne apart.
I took up the resolution like I always did on a new years eve. But this time, it wasn’t the usual one. I desperately needed a change.
And I started my morning walks which turned into morning runs. And ever since then, I am running. And it’s been eventful 7 years enjoying and growing every day.
In this post, I am going to tell you exactly what has kept me consistently on the path of personal growth and self transformation. It may lead to busting a couple of myths and discovering some totally new ideas.
So, let me begin:
- You start really Slow.
Beginning should be slow. No matter how fast you want to move on the path of growth, you can’t beat yourself. And that’s what you learn to identify.
Start with totally accepting yourself and making a beginning with whatever you can. The problem is we all want to begin up there. Right at the top. You want to look great with the things.
Here, I want to say that a lot of people take a resolution that they want to be fit. And then whatever comes to their mind, they simply start doing which is fine. You need I experiment. But …
The moment they start doing, they start expecting too. And that big results. Like they may want to reduce their weight and get into the proper shape. The truth is you can only do what you are capable but you can’t expect anything out of that as a beginner.
As a beginner, give your self as much time as you can which means give yourself limitless time. If you taken a personal growth goal like getting into shape, the best thinking strategy could be – I am going to do it life time even if I don’t get it.
The problem is you have not sown the seeds yet and you want to see the fruits on a tree that is yet to be born as a seed and become a plant first.
I started with walking on the first day. It was the first day of the first month of the year which is 1st January. I went for a walk. Came back in like few minutes. And that’s it.
It took me 3 months to get the hang of walking. All I wanted to do was get up and go walking. Nothing else. Period. I forgot all my aspirations. Just one thing this time.
This allowed my mind to process the thought that I need to do this physical activity of walking every day. It took me that much time to just get one act right. It allowed my legs and feet for conditioning in the hindsight which is when I started to feel like walking is toring me and I should push some rapid movements – Start to run.
2. You keep a tab on your daily progress
I have failed several times before. I would start as a new year resolution and end up doing nothing after a few days or a few weeks.
This time, it was not just about getting into shape. It was the question of getting my life into shape. So, the only thing I kept in my mind : Keep it going and don’t fail. Stay a beginner but don’t just stop doing because you are not getting the results.
So, I started to write down. I would come back from running and write my distance. If I walked 2 kms, I would write that. If I ran 2 kms, I would write and document the same.
It was very babyish but as I started to fill my page with the small data fields like date and distance of the run, I found that I liked seeing all the tiny efforts put in one place. Well, that started to sum up and looked bigger and bigger every day. When I saw the progress with my eyes, wrote and documented with pen on paper, it made me feel my progress.
Imagine if you just walked about a km a day, how many kms you would have walked in a year : 365/366 kms as the case may be. A km is nothing but 365-66 is something considerable even for a year. It didn’t require much but it stacked up nicely when done on a consistent basis day after day after day.
Theoretically, It may not feel something profound, but when I started doing it, I started to feel the progress. And this requires negligible effort on my part. And trust me, you don’t want to see the whole castle, all you want to see is the patterns that could be a potential castle in the future. That fills you with hope and gives you a dream.
The first patterns are very slow to appear but once they do, you get the soar in your spirits. The daily little progress made simply because I showed up every day. I learned it practically that this is what consistency.
Consistency is not what doing big, doing great. It’s just about showing up no matter what !
I didn’t chase anything else. No pace, no heart beats, no nothing. But, I tracked what I did daily.
3. You keep it simple to save your energy
What happens is we indulge into a lot of things simply because we want results and that too quite fast. And this is the biggest anomaly of success. You can not predict your success as when you will be successful.
Once you realise that, you simply hang on to doing one thing and excelling at it. I took 3 months to learn to walk effectively, and as I was not getting torn apart by some deadline, I had all the time in the world and it made me think that I should simply build on what I learnt. So, I should move faster , I mean I should start running.
When you allow yourself the lifetime, you free yourself from the pressures of time. You get rid of million anxieties. You are free. When you remove the cap of time, you allow yourself to grow. Be it investing, relationships etc. Remember you can’t outpace your present self.
This simple thing to keep things simple allows you to save a lot of energy from thinking or trying out too many things. I vividly remember, how I lost a months salary in one day because I wanted to make all the money I made in one month in one day. When you want things to happen quickly, you turn dangerous and adventurous.
So, to lose fat from your belly if some one suggested that you could lose fat more doing Yoga, you ran to start doing yoga. If you found no results doing yoga and you heard some body utter Zumba, you changed your plan too quickly to switch over from Yoga to Zumba. No matter what you try to try changing your situation, you must remember that Rome was not built in a day.
Energy is a very precious Asset. Energy in your body. Energy in your thoughts. You need it all. So, Save them at all costs. In these 7 years, I busted the myth that you need to do a lot of things to get fit. My understanding is that you just need to master just one thing at a time. And to master anything, you need as much energy as you can pour into it.
So, keep it simple and Save energy – both mental and physical at all costs.
Even today, I get up every day and go for a run. Come back and carry on with my life. I have not diversified. Chase too many things, all at the same time just boils down to draining your energy.
4. You keep a tangible goal and work towards it.
Nothing is going to work, if there is no purpose. But define your purpose well. Defining the purpose well means making it specific so that you can see it. Getting fitter could be a generic goal but not a specific one. So, I gave myself a tangible to measure my progress.
I told myself, I can do 1-2 kms. That’s it. It was easy. And I did. As I found the data piling up and gathering momentum, I slowly started to press the lever. I raised it to 2,3,4 very slowly. Made some calculations and created some projections. What if ran 5 days with 2 kms a day. I would end up as:
5X2=10 kms a week
10X4= 40 kms a month
40X12=480 kms a year
And that didn’t sound bad at all. As you give your mind to work with numbers, you get the kick to multiply them. But not at the expense of some time bound goal. With the help of this idea, I ran 1800 kms in 2018.
Post work, I got time to describe the 4 traits and publishing it as promised on the first of Jan of 2025. The second part will have the remaining 3 in 2 days.
To be continued ……
