(Sad) Fitness Truth #3: Reaching Any Goal Takes Good Old-Fashioned Work
(Happy) Fitness Truth #3: Fitness Goals Are Obtainable
It is no fluke that not everyone exercises: exercising is hard work!
But like I said on Tuesday, the benefits are so outrageous the work pales by comparison. It’s an odd thing that once you work hard to reach a goal— really hard—the goal becomes less important because the value truly lies in the work you’ve put in.
Now, not every goal you have is achievable with only a certain amount of work. Say, for example, you want to be a millionaire or a movie star. Okay, yes, hard work is an absolute requirement. But for some goals, one needs to be lucky as well as work hard. Luck isn’t so easy to come by.
Not so with fitness. With fitness, you put in the work, be smart in how you train, and nearly every goal you have is obtainable.
How cool is that?!!
Take, for example, my goal of running a marathon. I made that a goal of mine in 2002 or maybe 2003. I worked hard but I wasn’t smart about how I trained. I developed a stress fracture and had to take months off of running. (That sucked!) I wasn’t sure how it would feel to run or jump again but I worked back to it.
It took weeks of running in a pool and biking, more weeks of running a few feet at a time on a rubberized track, months of running on trails to strengthen my legs. I changed how often I run, and developed other ways to strengthen my legs.
It was a long and laborious process. I think I trained my patience more than anything, even though I didn’t want to.
But I never reached that fitness goal of running a marathon. Years and years went by (years that included law school and passing the bar exam) and I felt ready again to set that old goal in front of me. So the entire year of 2009 I kept the marathon in my sights, and really devoted some time to making myself stronger and training to get through more than four hours of continual running.
And I did it.
It’s a funny thing about reaching a fitness goal like that, which you spent so long to achieve. It makes you think you can do anything.
Because you can.
