Habit Forming

It's been two days since my last post and guess how many times I've gone to the gym? Yep, twice. Yay me! Yesterday I went after work and unfortunately didn't have a lot of time. So I ran for 2 miles on the treadmill and then managed to get 3 sets of 10 pushups in before I had to leave. I hadn't been in my gym in forever and a few of the regulars wanted to know where I'd disappeared to so that took a bit of time, "pneumonia this, cold that, blah blah blah...".

I think I mentioned that when I worked out this past Friday I felt very weak and yesterday was no different. The pushups felt so hard and I was doing fewer than in the past. After some time off it's so hard to accept that you can't just jump back in where you were.

So today I ran on the treadmill, again for two miles. But this time I'd managed to procrastinate at work to the point of not having time for strength training at all. Makes my measly 30 pushups from the day before look better. While I was running on the treadmill I started thinking about how slow I am now as compared to before. And how difficult weight training is now, how few reps/sets I'll probably be able to do and how I'll have to lower the weights I lift.

I eventually caught myself and tried to get perspective. I can run for two miles, I'm sure more if I wanted to. How fast is not as important as the fact that I can. Besides, in general I'm more concerned with endurance vs speed anyway. How far, how long are both more important to me than how fast. But don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to getting some speed back eventually. As well as being able to lift heavier weights again.

But for now, while running on the treadmill, I realized I just want to focus on re-building the habit of exercise. I have completely fallen out of the habit and establishing that again is goal enough for now. So, I'm taking a bit of my own advice and setting the bar low. My goal for this week is to get to the gym four times and then do one thing outside on the weekend (probably a long run as I'm technically already in the training window for the Kaiser half).

As far as what I'll do at the gym? Doesn't matter. This is about forming the habit and nothing else. I just need to get my butt to the gym. What I do from there is icing on the cake. So I think I'll focus on this for the rest of this week and next week too. Then, with two weeks under my belt I can re-assess what feels right at the time.