Over a quarter of a century ago, a well-known sports brand began using the tagline "Just do it!", but nowadays the message has been buried beneath the message to buy the right shoes for your activity (and foot arch), make sure you are in your burn zone using a heart-rate monitoring watch, use apps to motivate yourself, eat the right food, push the right weights, don't become skinny fat, and so on and so on. But while all of these things encourage a healthy approach and enhance exercise, at the same time they are barriers to getting out there and doing it.
All the same, I see a good number of runners and cyclists out and about in the city where I live, not to mention early-morning dog walkers (sometimes running with their dogs). So people are out there doing it. Sometimes with music players or phones strapped to their arms, and maybe other tech, I don't know, but the important thing is they are being active. Has the modern world of apps contributed to this? Well it's certainly added one to the number of people: me.
Benefits for others
In order to fit a regular run into my day without imposing on others, I do it before the rest of the house rises: around 6.45 am. It's a great time to run as the city wakes up and it means I'm back to make breakfast and sandwiches for my family. But I do hate the idea that getting up early I might disturb the sound sleep of others. And so I tiptoe downstairs conscious of every creak.
The upside of the exercise, which happened fairly early on in implementing the regime, is that I stopped snoring at night, which provides my OH with a much better sleep. So she's all for it even if I've started to act like one of those crazy fitness freaks with the early mornings. But the early mornings are not a big deal once you become active, and it's interesting to note how most CEOs who rise early start the day with some sort of exercise, because I've become convinced this is how you rise early with enthusiasm (at least I can't think of any other way!).
From here to 8k
I broke past the 5 km barrier the other day and added a fairly steep hill to my run. It pushed aside a psychological barrier that was getting in the way. I was beginning to find my run mundane and predictable, but now with the fear of further height gain broken I've plotted a series of increasingly challenging runs on MapMyRun, which will build me up to 8 km. I'm no longer daunted by this and if I continue running, then I can see a point where I might reach 10 km, which happens to be roughly the distance from my house to the beach at Whitstable making it a great summer run.
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