Fitness for Life

   In my early 30s I started running for exercise. If you were to ask me then if I thought I'd ever run a marathon I would have said no.

   But in my early 40s I started power walking. I couldn't do much at first. Over time I was covering as much as 21 miles on a power walk, not realizing I was developing the stamina to run a marathon. What was happening is that I was taking it one step at a time. At 51 I ran my first marathon.

[1] Start Small

   I like to think of at least three steps toward attaining a goal. You might come up with more, but a beginning, a middle and a final step work quite well.

   So if you are starting from scratch and want to be able to walk 10 miles, the first step might be to just walk one. Forget about the other nine. Pretend those don't even exist. Drive down to the fire road on the ranch and park at the trail head, enjoy the beautiful views of the Pacific, and walk half way on the fire road and turn around and return back. There. That's a mile. Do this again and again until it's your standard walk.

   In step two, start pushing it further and further until you walk the length of the fire road and return. Now you're walking two miles. Do that until it becomes your standard. Once you've got a base down, you can now start lengthening your walks toward your 10 mile goal. In fact, I think the final step is usually the easiest to get motivated for.


[2] Exercise with a Friend

   What a great way to set yourself up to be accountable. When you are there to get someone out of the house and they are there for you, your chances of success just go up. Maybe your friend is a dog? That works too. From my own personal experience, dogs do a pretty good job of cajoling their humans to get outside and exercise with them.

   This is a good one, in view of the smartphones most of us now have. Send yourself a calendar invite complete with alerts that ping you before your appointed time to exercise. Some people find that if they only have a vague idea of when they'll exercise, it's easy to skip if something else comes up. But if they treat it as a hard start appointment it has a sense of importance the way a business meeting does.

   Remember in physical education class when the instructor said the goal of P.E. was to help students develop a lifetime sport? The idea is that exercise is a lot more appealing if it represents something to do that you like. Remember, it doesn't matter if you think you are no good at the sport. Really, it doesn't. What matters is that you have fun. Maybe you loved throwing a frisbee around in high school. Why can't that be at the core of your fitness routine? It takes a little effort but not much to find some partners to get out and throw.

   Let's dispense with the notion that athletes are highly paid professional football and baseball players we see on television. Whenever you exercise your body is doing all the same things they're doing. You are an athlete. And when you start thinking this way - that your body is a fine tuned biological machine, no matter what shape it's in - it can help to motivate you to take care of it. After all, it really is a miracle that we can move and experience the world around us.

[6] Reward Yourself

 Reward yourself for those small steps you take toward reaching that goal. Not to be too tongue in cheek, but I'm not talking about rewarding yourself by not having to exercise. A new pair of walking shoes or outfit, a book you wanted to read or a play you've been wanting to see might be a little more realistic. Some of the best rewards align with your exercise goals themselves. When you attain your ability to walk 10 miles, perhaps a great goal would be a vacation to beautiful spot like Yosemite or Yellowstone National Parks.