Death By Treadmill

FML

I vividly remember the first time Merritt tried to jog in downtown KCMO, she called me really PEEEEEEEE’d off and complaining about how stupid, painful, and pointless running is. But she’s a glutton for punishment and decided to do it again but this time she did the “couch-2-5k” program. Its pretty much just going from being a bum on the couch to alternating between walking and jogging until you can either jog 5k or for 30 mins straight. While she was in the process of killing herself, she began to really like jogging and being on the treadmill. Now Merbish Nicole Watson-almost-Benson considers herself a “runner” (although she routinely injures herself because she refuses to stretch, warm-up, or cool down) and the proof is in the medal-shaped pudding


I decided a while ago that I was going to try and get fit but never really kept it going. I would try to go to the gym every day and then quit because I got busy. Or I would try to play a sport with the Polys like volleyball and discovered that I have little to no coordination. I didn’t have any real weight loss goals, I just wanted to be able to run around with my nieces, nephews and future children. I wanted to participate when my friends played Xtreme Spoons for FHE.

And, let’s face it- don’t we all wish we were able to outrun the zombie hoards when the apocalypse comes?



I’ve also been trying to consistently underachieve. It’s something that I read about in one of Robert Kiyosaki’s books- he says that you should have lofty goals but not at first. You should learn to build confidence in yourself and have a lot of small victories as you try to accomplish your goal instead of having some lofty goal and feeling like a massive failure when life gets in the way and you cant achieve it. For example, if I’m in the habit of waking up at noon and I want to develop a habit of waking up by 6am- I can’t just keep all of my same habits and get up at 6am. I’ll be too sleepy and go right back to bed. When I finally wake up again at noon-30, I’ll feel like a failure bc I wasn’t able to get up when I wanted to. But if take Kiyosaki’s advice, my overarching goal is to wake up at 6am but my goal for the week is to just wake up ANYTIME BEFORE NOON. Even if I wake up at 11:59, I feel like a winner and I get into the habit of keeping promises to myself. The week after that, my goal is to wake up ANTIME before 11:30am, and so forth until I get to 6am.

I’m applying the “consistently underachieving” principle to working out- so my overarching goal is to run a 10k at some point this year. But my immediate goals, since January 10th, has been to just put on my workout clothes for a week and stretch. And then the following week, I put on the workout clothes, stretched AND did core exercises (100 crunches).


Today, I started the actual program….. and it almost killed me. The first week, I have to alternate between 60secs of jogging with 90secs of walking for 20 mins. I was only on my third rep of jogging when I thought my heart would explode and had to stop. I went back to my apartment and neglected to stretch because I was too busy dying. Once I caught my breath, I stretched bc I was afraid of feeling any worse that I did right at that moment and realized…. my shins and feet hurt…. But it hurt soooo good. I think I may be a little masochistic- because once I was all stretched out and I caught my breath, I wanted to go back to the gym and finish. I know its wrong but it feels so right. My roommate’s friend took pics of my abject misery… and my super creepy “let’s go do it again” face. It scares me a little.