Discipline, schmiscipline

Five years ago, I ran my first and only half-marathon, the Dallas Rock and Roll Half Marathon. I finished in two hours and ten minutes, which is neither great nor terrible. Since then, I have signed up for two more half marathons, but was unable to compete due first to an injury and later to inclement weather that resulted in the race being cancelled. At some point, I fell out of running on a regular basis, and now I’m trying to get back into it. As it turns out, this has been less than a stunning success.

As a therapist, I often tout the benefits of regular exercise, which has been proven in rigorous experiments to be about as effective at treating depression as modern antidepressant medication. I often tell clients, “Anything that’s good for your physical health is good for your mental health, too.” I encourage my clients to find some way to get some exercise, even if it’s just going for walks. “It’s impossible to go for a walk and come back in a worse mood than when you left,” I’ve been known to say. Strictly speaking, this isn’t 100 percent true, because if you go for a walk and get mugged or hit by a car or trip and hit your head, there’s a good chance you might come home in a worse mood than when you left. But mostly, walks are good.

The problem is, lately when I tell clients this, I feel a bit hypocritical. My half-assed attempts at getting back to a regular running schedule aren’t really consistent with the advice I so freely dole out. A client once asked me, after I offered a bit of sage wisdom, if I  took my own advice. “As far as you know, I do,” was my half-joking response. Clearly, I haven’t been behaving in a manner that is consistent with the recommendations I give, at least lately. Until now.

I had every intention of getting up this morning and jogging my daughter via our jogging stroller to her preschool, which is just a little more than a mile away. This is something we have done quite a few times, but not always consistently. I did it twice last week, and I knew the weather would be turning nicer today. But I didn’t do it. Because it was chilly. I knew this was a lame excuse, but it sufficed. However, when I looked at my schedule today, I saw I had a free hour before lunch, so I decided to take my running gear to work in order to get in a good run and assuage my guilt.

My work is about three blocks from the Katy Trail, which is my favorite place to run in Dallas, besides White Rock Lake. I saw a couple of clients, then suited up and hit the trail. It wasn’t much of a run, because I am so out of shape, but it felt good. While I ran, I thought about my lack of follow-through with the whole exercise thing, and I knew I had to make the decision to get serious. Then it occurred to me that I ought to write a blog about it, because I would put it out there for my multitude of readers that I was going to get serious about running, and thus suffer the embarrassment of being a candy-ass if I didn’t make good on my goal. Which is why you’re reading this, and not some incredibly clever and creative work of short fiction or whatnot.

Several years ago, before I ran the half marathon, I was running an average of about three miles, three times a week. Not terrible, but I wasn’t really building any endurance. At that time, I was playing in a band called Jayson Bales and the Charmers, led by, you guessed it, Jayson Bales. Now, Jayson is just about the busiest guy I know. He is a vice-president at his company, he has three kids, he is active in his church, he does a lot of coaching, and he played in a band (at the time). And yet, in spite of all these commitments, he somehow found the time to train for, and complete, a full marathon. Since then, he’s run several more.

At the time, part of my excuse for not running very much was, “I just don’t have the time.” And yet, here was Jayson, who was way busier than me, and obviously, he had managed it. One night at band practice, I asked him when he found the time to run. I thought he would tell me he had a set time every day, but I was wrong. “Whenever I can,” he replied. “It might be midnight, it might be five a.m. It might be noon, or six-thirty in the evening. But I run.”

In that moment, Jayson taught me a valuable lesson: my lack of running was not due to a shortage of time. It was because I wasn’t making running a priority. The lesson was, if you make something a priority, you will find the time to do it, period. Everything else is an excuse. (Thanks, Jayson.)

After that, I got a little more serious about running, and then I signed up for the half-marathon, which was about four months away. I knew I had to train like I had never trained before, because in fact, I had never trained before. I had a choice of whether I wanted to train as part of a group, or do it solo. There were two good running stores near where I lived, and they both offered training programs. But I eschewed their offers, firstly because I wanted to be able to say I did it all by myself, and secondly because I hoped to one day be able to tell the tale and use the word eschewed.

I downloaded a 12-week half-marathon training schedule from the internet, and when the time came, I stuck to it. This was about a month after my daughter Ellie was born. Also, it was cold. At the time, we lived very close to Glencoe Park, and the Katy Trail was just up the road, so I had good places to run. I guess the fact that I had paid to register for the race was incentive, because if I didn’t follow through, that would mean I had wasted my money. I followed the twelve-week training course pretty faithfully. The longest run of the training program was ten miles, about two weeks before the race. This worried me a little, because ten miles is still three miles short of a half-marathon. But I told myself that the excitement of being in a race would buoy me and give me the necessary oomph to finish the race.

As it turned out, this was the case. My goal going into it was to run the whole way, without having to walk. This I did. In fact, I didn’t even stop to pee at one of the many pit stop areas along the way, even though I felt the need to go starting around mile seven. All of the port-a-potties along the way had long lines, and I didn’t want to break my momentum. Finally, around mile nine or so, I decided, screw it, I’ll take a leak when I’m done.

The race was actually pretty enjoyable, and I chatted with some fellow runners along the way. I was also cheered along by two special people who came out to give me a supportive boost – the aforementioned Jayson Bales, who greeted me at around mile three or so, and my wife, Kimberly, who made the short trek from our house to Glencoe Park, which was part of the route. She even brought along our baby girl in the also aforementioned baby stroller. Seeing Jayson and Kimberly lifted my spirits tremendously, and meant a lot.

Also, it was cold as shit that day.

That race was the high-water mark of my physical fitness, and the tide has been rolling out since then. I’m now five years older, and at a time in my life when a lot of changes can happen to my body in five years. I am no longer young, and I don’t respond to exercise like I did a few years ago. Which is partly why I’m determined to get back into some kind of shape.

A couple of years ago, I saw a meme on Facebook that said, “Screw motivation! What you need is discipline.” Most of what gets passed around on Facebook is nonsense, but the more I thought about that statement, the more it made sense. The problem with motivation is that it’s notoriously unreliable, and often short-lived. Plus, it carries with it a built-in excuse to not do something. “I just can’t seem to get motivated.”

I was talking about this with a client, and he showed me a picture of a sign hanging up in his gym. It said, “Commitment is doing what you said you were going to do, long after the mood you said it in has passed.” It’s the same concept. Call it discipline, commitment, whatever. It means doing it even when you don’t feel like it. It doesn’t offer a built-in excuse, unlike motivation. I was able to complete that half-marathon because I trained in a disciplined manner.

Believe me, I am not the poster boy for discipline, as everyone who knows me will attest. If I were, it wouldn’t have taken me four years to write a novel that could have been completed in six months. But saying, “I’m not very disciplined,” is also an excuse. Discipline, like patience or kindness, isn’t a commodity that you either have or don’t have. It’s a choice. You can choose to be disciplined, or not. If I’m going to start running on a serious level again, then I’m going to have to make myself run when I don’t feel like it. The good news, which I know from experience, is that once I’ve been running for a while, I start to enjoy it and look forward to it.

By the way, I started this post two days ago. Yesterday, I ran my daughter to school in her jogging stroller. Today I didn’t run, my excuse being, I ran two days in a row, and I need to let my legs rest. I will run my daughter again tomorrow. I will run three or four times a week, every week. If not, feel free to call me a candy-ass.