Continuing on from my previous post, hopefully you have started thinking about what activities you enjoy doing. Not just enjoy, but love – and can’t wait to get back for more!
Thankfully, for some people the difficulty ends there. Doing something they love works well for them, as they are motivated to make time for that special activity. This is particularly true for those who love activities that are very flexible in when and where they can be done – running and walking are classic examples. All you really need is a good pair of shoes, feet to put them on, appropriate attire, and you’re off… even if it’s raining, because some hardcore runners especially love running in the rain!
But for many of us, it’s not quite that simple.
You might discover that you absolutely LOVE Zumba classes, but it is out of your budget to spend money on casual classes or a gym membership. Or maybe all the classes at your local gym are at times that don’t suit your family schedule. Which means that your next task is to find something that works!
That may mean doing a little extra research to find a timetable that suits you, maybe at a different gym. It might mean changing gyms to one that has a creche because you don’t have anyone else available to babysit. Or crunching the numbers at home to somehow make some money available to pay for classes. Or making a sacrifice and asking for a gym membership for your birthday or Christmas, instead of that handbag you’ve been eyeing…
Sometimes, it could even mean doing something that you don’t actually love so much. Yes, unfortunately that is right! Let’s face it, we all go through seasons in life when we can’t always be 100% doing only the things we love. We have roles and responsibilities too… and sometimes it is more important to maintain our health doing something we don’t like so much, than doing nothing at all.
So I would like to share my journey into the activity of running, something which I never did enjoy much, although the more I did it, the more I grew to enjoy it more, probably because I got better at it – after all, who doesn’t enjoy doing something they’re good at?
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Running and me did not go together. But at one stage in my life, my beloved aerobics classes were not working out for me, because they were either too early for me to get to on time after work, or too late such that I was getting home much later than I wanted. So I resorted to using the cross-trainers and bikes at the gym. Unless there was a good program on the TV for me to watch whilst working out, I generally found this activity BORING. But I persisted, and over time I noticed that some of the women who worked out at the same time as me were spending their entire time on the treadmill RUNNING! All 30-60 minutes, nonstop!
So I got this crazy idea in my head that I wanted to get better at running, and be just like them. Why? I dunno… I just thought I’d give it a go. I started out going at a snail’s pace on the treadmill and feeling agony at every step. Eventually my pace improved, and then I participated in a 10km fun run that the gym organised. Except it was probably more like a 2km run followed by 2 km of stop-start running-walking and then 6km of walking. lol.
I have a friend who loves her long distance running – an easy recovery run for her is probably 15km or so! She suggested I sign up for a fun run to help motivate myself. For me, that worked. It gave me a goal to build up to 6km by the date of the run, because the run itself was 8km and according to my friend, to train for that I only needed to be able to run about 80% of that distance (she was right). Also, I had to pay to enter the fun run, and let’s face it, there is no Chinese person alive on the entire face of this planet that likes to see even 5 cents go to waste. So once I was signed up and paid for, there was no way I was backing out of that run. After that fun run (which my friend kindly accompanied me on, going at my pace – except for the last few hundred metres where she pulled ahead of me and challenged me to keep up), I signed up for the next one, and the next one… and before I knew it, somehow I got myself signed up for a half marathon, urgh!
Another thing that worked for me with my running training, was to organise a running group, which was essentially a group of us who got together once a week to do a training session. Sometimes the session was just going for a run together, other times it was specific drills like hill sprints. We even did the Thousand Steps – twice in one session! This worked for me because, as mentioned in my previous post, I enjoy exercise in a group setting.
So the moral of the story? If responsibilities and other commitments are genuinely preventing you from doing those activities you love and don’t really need much motivation to do, and you have to resort to doing something you don’t really like all that much, then try to add an element in there that you do enjoy. For me it was turning the single person activity of running into a group activity.
And if that fails, think of something else that makes you tick and try and add that factor in somehow. For me, that was the money factor – the fun runs I signed up for well in advance, I didn’t back out of. But there were a couple of runs where I told myself, “I’ll see where I’m at closer to the date before signing up”… and guess what? I never ended up doing them.
P.S. Ultimately what works best for me is to attend group fitnesses classes that I love, but the above were strategies that worked for me in a setting where the activity was not my first choice 🙂
Nov 2006: About to go to my first fun run
Jan 2007: Running Group session
Apr 2007: Run for the Kids
May 2007: Geared up for the Great Ocean Road half marathon
May 2007: I Survived the Great Ocean Road half marathon!
A Healthy Mumma 