Went back to the gym today, and walked three miles on a treadmill. It wasn't bittersweet at all, rather it was like coming back to an old friend. I'm sure I'll be running plenty in the days to come. The whole process was filled with revisiting old familiar things:
- I put on my favorite sweatpants, which I have been running in for years.
- I had good gear to use - good, quality running socks, good shoes
- I was listening to a familiar, and favorite audiobook, David Eddings' Enchanters' End Game
It felt good to do. I walked three miles, bringing my #365Miles total up to 5 miles. Not bad for the 3rd day of the year.
My gym is designed to encourage you. Snappy, high bpm music plays in the locker rooms and on the gym floor. The walls are decorated with quotes and encouraging statements, like "Leap and the net will appear."
I remember years ago, before I had first found running and really dug into it, I was both excited and terrified to do it. I had no idea if I would be able to do it. There's no question - I've lost a fair amount of fitness this past year. But it's exciting to leap towards getting it back.
One big decision I did come to, as a result of all this is that my experimentation using a fitbit has come to an end.
I think that wearing it has had the opposite effect from what I wanted. The fitbit monitors your steps all day long. For work reasons, I have to take it off when I'm at my desk, which is kind of a drag. But I also have come to realize that wearing it actually encourages a sort of mindlessness, an "auto-pilot" mindset in me, that isn't in my favor.
Don't get me wrong, I'm ALL ABOUT metrics. I love them. I have a lovely, very fancy Garmin running watch that I will wear when I do run and walk. And I'm more committed than ever to using Lose-It to track my nutrition and exercise. The thing I see about the fitbit is, it makes me sort of mentally lazy about it. That's not a device problem, nor is it a Mako problem. It's just how I'm wired. I need the focused attention of tracking my workout explicitly, without relying on the "background chatter" of my calories/steps burned by daily life.
I'm grateful that I can return to what works for me.