Doing the thing

Some days you wake up and don’t want to do the thing. Maybe it’s the 6th of January and your mind is overwhelmed. You thought that January first was a new you, a new start. You made that commitment, set that goal.

Then Monday hits and you couldn’t sleep. You question everything, and wonder why your crazy New Year’s Eve brain thought it was a good idea to do that thing.

Here’s where you have to decide if it’s worth continuing or quitting.

Both are ok.

That sounds like blashemy to some.

My view over the years has been to worry less about starting a thing on January 1st, and more to try a thing for a period fo time and see where it goes. Peacock resolutions is a fun way to think about it.

When I planned my first Marathon I started partway into December, then ran with the full training program in January. It was a lot of fun. Five months and 500 miles of training later I crossed the finish line on racing day short of the cutoff time. It was a profound feeling. I’d set a plan, make a goal, and figured it out.

The trick though, looking back now, was less in the large goal, and more in the daily pieces of getting there.

I printed out a calendar, based on Hal Higdon’s training plan, simplified it to just say how many miles I needed to do on a given day, then crossed off each day with a big red marker.

It was a visual reward that helped me move through the months.

Fast forward to now, I don’t spend every year with big goals. I often muse on a thing for a while, try to figure out a way to approach it, then give it a solid try for a few months. That means that I have a trail of things that have failed, but some succeeded.

Maybe I’ll adjust the method in future years, but for now I’m more interested in the small pieces I can do daily. The large marathons are incredibly fun, but not in my head space at the moment.