500 Words — Day Seven: Consistency

Yesterday, I took a break from writing and now this seems harder than ever before. One you get a taste of freedom, you can’t get enough. You spend the whole day do nothing really that important or useful. But hey, that’s freedom. I have the freedom to waste my whole day away procrastinating writing the post for today. It just feels by skipping yesterday, all the momentum of the week is just killed. I was going to write about being flexible and not holding onto a rigid schedule, but that vibe definitely died somewhere in the last few hours.

When I first started taking running seriously about seven years ago or so, I would wake up at seven in the morning each day and run. I think I did that for forty something days or so before I took a break from the runs. I was feeling a little sore so the break was good, but I have never had a running streak anywhere close to the length of that one since. Nowadays, I have one break day and do a workout day without any running to keep my legs fresh. However, that is all structured in a way that the consistency is seen from week to week rather than from day to day. Perhaps this is to suggest that I shouldn’t be disappointed in losing my six day writing streak, but should be open to adapting the writing schedule to be something different. Even with my running / exercise schedule, I do tend to adjust it for travel and recently even took a week off for the holidays. The key is feeling that a conscious choice is being made to change the schedule rather than giving into one’s base desires to take the easiest path.

But for some reason, yesterday feels like I took the easiest path. I don’t think I accomplished anything I wanted to outside of the running I did early in the morning. Perhaps, my expectations were too high. I don’t think I really could have used the time given to me a lot better, but I think I used yesterday almost as an excuse for today. Once you lose the momentum, it is hard to get started back up again. Even with the weekly running schedule, the hardest run to get up for is the Sunday long run. The day after my break from running. The day after my break from work. The difficulty is not being consistent, but accepting and recovering from inconsistency. My problem is not that I’m inconsistent, but that I’m rigid and lack flexibility. I strive too much for consistency, when consistency isn’t the most important thing. Consistency certainly makes hard things easier (like exercise). But having discipline transcends that need to rely on consistency. I have a good reason to take a break, but I now the break is over, it’s time to get back and track and rebuild momentum.

I’ve always found that the best way of recovering from that lost momentum is to lower one’s expectations and take it from there. For Sunday runs, it was an easy mile to get the legs warm and to regain the rhythm. Once the momentum is back, the rest of the run is easy. For today’s writing, I really just need to get that first subpar paragraph out of the way. From there I was able to get that thought about flexibility out even though I was definitely not in the mood when I first started writing. It’s crazy how quickly your mood about something can change once you put a little effort into starting and then moving along from there.