6.2 Miles in 51' 18"
July 4, 2009

1. Wanting to is not enough.

As is true with everything else, getting started with exercise and sticking with it begins with willingness. Everybody wants to exercise. Everybody wants to be in shape. Everybody wants to maintain a weight that’s healthy and attractive. Many are called, but few respond. It’s just a hard thing to do. You’ve got to have the willingness to spend time doing it every day. I often hear, “I’d love to get in shape, but I just don’t have time.” For nearly all of us time isn’t the real issue. We find the time to do plenty of other things like watch television, eat a leisurely lunch, or sleep. Keep a log and examine it. If you’re honest, you’ll find an hour. We also have to find the willingness to hurt a little bit so we’ll feel good for the other 23 hours of the day. In the tools I suggest that the best producer of willingness is a bottom. For me, my willingness began when my alcoholic drinking drastically affected my health. The picture of the lump in my widow maker artery in my heart provided the thump for me to get big time serious about exercise. Wouldn’t it be nice for you to find the willingness before the diabetes, heart disease, or cancer kicks in? I wish I could tell you how to do that. Some people know how. Maybe reading enough stuff like that will turn on your willingness switch.

2. Understand that it's OK to hurt.

It's OK to hurt. Not fun, but OK. In fact, you have to hurt some to be effective. There's a difference between hurt and pain though. Read about it here if you haven't read it yet.

3. Work hard, but not too hard.

I’ve learned that I can’t let pain defeat me. Unfortunately, too many people do. They say to me, “I used to run (or swim, play basketball, ski, whatever), but my knees gave out.” Or, the feet gave out. Or, the back gave out. Almost all these folks are young. Too young to be giving out. Some are older. Doesn’t matter. Absent disease, all that stuff shouldn’t give out until you’re, like, in your eighties. That is, if you exercise and maintain your proper weight. If you don’t, get ready for bionic knees.

Here’s the problem – when you start doing something your body is not used to, you’ll feel some pain. This is different than the “hurt” I talked about before. Pain is a different thing. You have ligaments, bones, tendons, and a whole bunch of other stuff that are doing things they’re not used to doing. They complain. Mightily. Pay attention to them, but don’t give in to them.

I am lucky to have an orthopedist who believes our parts are better if we use them. Dr. Medders encourages my running. Shortly after beginning my treadmill routine, my right knee began hurting. Again, not the hurting of fatigue. I’m talking pain. “Uh, oh,” I thought, “I’m finished.” Dr. Medders disagreed. He told me how my knee was sliding back and fourth because the ligaments, or tendons, or something, I forget, weren’t tight. He told me to buy a brace from the drug store and keep running. I did. I wore the brace for a year. As I lost weight, the brace became looser and looser until I was having a hard time keeping it up. Out of frustration, I ripped it off one day mid run. Whoa. No pain. Didn’t need it anymore. I guess the running had strengthened the parts.

My hip started hurting. Pain type hurt. “Nuts,” I thought. I mentioned that to my GP, Dr. Johnson, for that one. He had x-rays taken. Everything was OK, except I seemed to have been born with an extra lumbar disc. No big deal and nothing to do with my hip. I kept running. My hip pain was significant at the beginning of each run. After about a mile, it’d go away. Next day same thing. My knees had some pain, too. After a couple of weeks, the pain left. A year later, the same thing happened. And, then again the year after that. Finally, I figured out that when the weather turns colder in the fall, my body reacts. Hips, knees, some other parts have some pain. When all those parts get used to the cold, the pain goes away.

If you’re looking for reasons to quit exercising, it’s not hard to find them. The number one reason seems to be pain. Listen to this: pain is not the end of the world. Some pain in the hip and the knees won’t kill you. But, a tight, heavy vice like feeling in your chest isn’t good. If you have that, stop and call an ambulance. In fact, don’t start doing any exercise until you see your doctor first and get clearance. But, you won’t die because your knee hurts. Don’t let that stop you.

Now, it is possible that you could develop some bodily malfunction that prohibits your exercise of choice. If so, choose another one. Can’t run? Swim. Nowhere to swim? Ride a bicycle. Feel unsafe on a bicycle? Buy a rowing machine. Think you can’t afford it? There are a million resolution guys selling them cheap on Craigslist. There’s something out there that you can do that’ll make you sweat and raise your heart rate.

Look, if you don’t want to exercise hard – fine. Just admit that. Don’t use pain as an excuse. The honesty will make you feel better about yourself. Honesty always does.

5. Make no exceptions. I’ve learned that if I want to keep on exercising, I can make no exceptions. A sure way to stop is to start skipping days. Every time you skip a day, it’s a whole lot easier to skip another one. Skip a Monday because you’re tired after the first day back at work and skipping Mondays will become the norm. It just will. You can’t fight that. Then you’ll skip Friday because you’ve got too much to do to get ready to go out on Friday night. Do that once and Fridays will become an off day, too. Now, Mondays and Fridays are gone. Once you allow yourselves those exceptions, you’ll make more.

• If you want to keep doing this for life, you have to keep doing it for life. You can’t make exceptions.
  I was in the hospital waiting for my second cardiac cath. I went in on Friday, and the cath was scheduled for Monday. I had to spend all weekend in the cardiac wing of Athens Regional Medical Center. When that happened, I’d been running for nearly three years. I’d learned about the importance of never making exceptions. I learned that first from eating. I decided it would be OK to eat an Oreo one night. The next night, I wanted another one. Eating an Oreo every night became the norm. When I realized that, I had to go through the pain of getting rid of that obsession for Oreos all over again. I didn’t like that.
  
  Just don’t make exceptions.
  
  
• Here's what I mean: So, I’m lying in my hospital bed with an IV dripping blood thinner hooked to me. Every thirty minutes I’d go out on the floor for a walk, dragging along that trolley thing that has the IV bag hanging on it. By Monday morning, I was on my third day without a run and was moving into nutcase territory. I knew I was setting myself up for not running being the norm. Couldn’t allow that.
  
  My room was on a hall that emptied into an atrium that overlooked the lobby below. I dragged my IV stand behind me and began walking laps around the opening. Felt good. I began to walk faster. That felt better. Faster still. Really great. Soon I was jogging along, dragging my rolling IV thingee along beside me. I hear a sound, but keep going. There it is again.
  
  “Mr. Wyrick.” It’s my name I hear. “Mr. Wyrick!” Louder now. I look across the opening and see a nurse hurrying down the hallway from the cardiology unit nursing station. She’s waving her arms. “Stop that!” I keep jogging around the opening and head back toward her. “Stop that, Mr. Wyrick. Now!” I’m in front of her and stop. “What are you doing?”
  
  “Getting some exercise. I needed a run.”
  
  “You can’t do that! For God’s sake, you’re in the cardiology wing!” She takes the IV tower and leads me back to my room. She talks, seemingly more to herself than to me. “I get a call from the telemetry people. They say Mr. Wyrick’s heart rate has suddenly increased. I go to your room and it’s empty. I look around and find you out there running!”
  
  I am sheepish. I don’t want to be difficult. I promise not to do it again.
  
  OK. I admit it. Going for a run while hooked up to an IV while your waiting for a cardiac cath just might border on the obsessive-compulsive thing. I’m not suggesting you do that. I am suggesting that if you want to be better, you exercise hard every day, or at least six days a week, and never skip unless you’re hospitalized, or something just as dire, because if you skip, skipping becomes the rule. I’m going to repeat this because it’s so critical: If you don’t run on Monday because you’re tired from getting back into the workweek, you’ll start skipping every Monday. When you skip on Friday because you have to get ready to go that night, skipping on Friday’s the rule. That’ll happen. Guaranteed.
  
  

6. No Guessing Allowed.

You won't know if you're working hard enough or working too hard if you're just guessing.

• Whichever exercise you choose, invest in a heart rate monitor. Get one with a strap. Determine your target rate and stay in it during your cardio. If you don't have the monitor, you will almost always underestimate the effort you are making. That's human nature. Some of you will work too hard and quit when you didn't have to. In forums on the Internet, you'll see people suggest that superset weight lifting is as good as other types of cardio. That's true if your heart rate stays up for forty-five minutes. I can't do that. No way. If you can, go for it. But, your heart rate monitor is essential for you to be wearing so you know if you're achieving your effective heart rate or not.
  
  Suggestion: You can buy one for between fifty and a hundred dollars that's more than adequate. Polar watches are well reviewed, but the cheaper ones have a major flaw. The batteries in the strap cannot be replaced by the user. I've had three and the battery wore out on all of them in less than a year. You have to mail it to Polar and if the warranty has expired, it costs as much as the watch to replace the battery. After my third Polar strap died, I bought a Nike C6. It works great and when the battery wore out I went to the drug store, bought a battery for a couple of bucks, and replaced the old one. Worked great again.
  
  
• If you don't have a heart rate monitor, use the talking test. If you're jogging along with a friend and can have a conversation easily, you're not working hard enough. Conversation should be difficult, but not impossible while running flat or downhill. Running uphill, conversation should be nearly impossible.
  
  
• Time your exercising. Don't guess. You need to spend 45 minutes a day at least six days a week. I run for 45 minutes five days a week. On two days, I lift weights and do an an easy run for a total of 45 minutes. It works.

7. Use strategies for getting started.

Many days I’m tired. I don’t want to hurt. I don’t want to run. My stomach tightens as I walk the couple of hundred feet to my starting point. It would be easy to just not do it. But, I know the rule about never making exceptions. If I decide not to do it today, it's a thousand times easier to skip tomorrow. Here's some strategies I use when I just don't want to do it.

• I carry it through to the end. That’s something the treatment center taught me to do when I think about drinking alcohol. Works for running, too. I’ve learned that no matter how tired and unmotivated I am at the beginning of a run, my attitude will be way different at the end. As I begin dragging myself up the road, I envision walking down my driveway to my porch forty-five minutes later: Sweat pouring, breathing hard, and feeling wonderful. Feeling just fabulous. That happens every time. Carrying it through to the end in my mind makes it possible for me to get started when I don’t want to get started.
  
  Later in the run, when I’m running up a hill and working hard to breathe and my legs hurt and the hill won’t quit, I carry it through to the end. I can carry it through to a good end or a bad end. I envision myself on the treadmill taking my annual nuclear stress test to check on my heart disease. I see the doctor telling me everything looks good. Or, I might go to the other end. I’m fat again and grasping my chest and having that sense of doom they say heart attack victims feel. Either way the motivation returns when I carry it through to the end.
  
  
• I give myself permission to quit. This sounds like a contradiction to the "make no exception" rule. It's not. I give myself permission to quit after the first mile if I still feel miserable .I know the mile point on each of my routes. Here's the key: so far, I've only stopped once and that was when I experienced a weird whole leg cramp that would not quit. Later that day, I finished the run, though.
  
  
• Get dressed. My friend, Beth, gives herself permission to quit before she even starts. She says, "When I run at dawn before work, it is as you say: hard. So I make a deal with myself: All I have to do is put on my togs and shoes. That's all. Just get ready. I don't actually have to run. But there is nothing quite so stupid as doing all that at the front door and then not going. Works like a charm." At the very least, just dress out and see what happens.
  
  
• The big deal is to get moving toward the goal. When I give myself permission to quit at some point on the run, or at least change my clothes, that allows me to get started. The fact is that once I've run a mile, it's always OK. It's the getting started that's bad. Here's the neat thing: When I don't feel well in the beginning, I feel much better after the run. I just have to get started.