Dr. Forbush Thinks

Exercise is never easy. Lying in front of the TV, pool or beach - that is easy.

The only thing worse than motivating yourself to exercise is trying to motivate yourself to exercise when you are sore. After my first triathlon last weekend I woke up the following morning to a stiff back, aching quads and cramping calves. I must have pushed myself or some of my muscles a bit further than I was accustomed.

My normal routine is to wake up, go work out come home and get ready for work. Having this routine almost unbroken for three years allowed me to become fit and trim, and now I am worried that breaking the routine will lead to the slippery slope of lying in bed sleeping and waking up at a reasonable time.

So, as I lay in bed Monday morning contemplating whether I should go work out I began to rationalize. I postulated that I had just done a two-hour triathlon the day before. I did deserve a break, didn’t I? But my paranoid side suggested that it might take me several days to get over the soreness. Shouldn’t I move in order to work out some of the kinks and cramps? Well, after a few minutes I came up with a compromise. I would go work out, but I would do an easy pace and work out the kinks and cramps. I was fooling myself with this disillusion because I knew that once I entered the water I would begin to push myself a little harder and the workout would be more than I had talked myself into.

Motivation always seems to be a major hurdle. Even when I know that I enjoy running now I always dread that first mile in a run. Recently I have begun augmenting my exercise routine with running at work a few times a week. I began by running a 10K on Tuesdays and Thursdays at lunchtime. But, lunch is the hottest time of the day, so I kept making excuses and putting off running until it would be too late to have enough time to run and shower and get back to work. So, I talked myself into running after work instead. This way the sun needs to set before it is too late to go running. But, the most annoying thing about all this is that I have to fool myself into starting the run.

Once I get through that first mile I am ready willing and able to do 5 more without a problem.

Yesterday I was still a bit sore from the race, so I had to convince myself that it would be a good thing to run a 10K after work. It was Tuesday and I normally run after work on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Once again I started to beg for mercy because of my sore legs. They weren't nearly as sore as they were the day before, but somehow I thought that I would be able to talk myself out of running. But, 5:00 rolled around and I quickly grabbed my running stuff and got ready to run before I had enough time to talk myself out of it.

The route that I run has some unconventional points were I take splits in order to estimate how fast I am running. This is important because I know that if I take my pace out to quickly I will eventually need to give up and slow down. I am in pretty good shape now, so I don’t need to walk, but I do need to slow down to a 10 minute per mile pace if I take it out to fast.

Yesterday I ran the first 1.75 miles in 14:00 minutes even. That is an 8 minute per mile pace, which is a bit slow for me now, but I was sore and I was just working out the kinks and cramps from the race. I knew that an 8 minute per mile pace was just under 50 minutes for 6.2 miles or a 10K. So, I talked myself into keeping that pace so I could at least run a 50 minute 10K. But I thought that I could pick up the pace ever so slightly so that I could create a safety cushion of a few seconds just in case I got tired toward the end of the run. This is just another psychological method to get me to push myself a bit harder. And, sure enough I saw that my next 1.75 miles was 13:28, which was about a 7:42 minutes per mile pace. I felt pretty good, much of my soreness was a thing of the past. After this point I have a couple of short legs that usually take me 3:10 to 3:30 to do depending on my motivation and attitude. I don’t usually push these so much. I do, however, try to pick up speed from mile 4.5 to mile 6. These are two legs of .75 miles each. I try to go fast on the first one, then I try to negative split the last one. Then I coast to the end of the run, the last 0.2 miles.

I ran 5:41 for the first 0.75 leg and I beat it with a 5:29 for the second leg. I finished with a 47:42 even with waiting a couple of seconds for cars so that I could cross the street at the end. So, I guess I was able to run under the 50-minute challenge.

The weird thing about this entire escapade are the mind games that I continue to play with myself in order to motivate myself to run a little bit faster. I would feel defeated if I were to say that I was going to run under 48 minutes before I even started to run. I would talk myself into the difficulty of not being able to do 47 anything, even though I have run sub-47 10Ks before. Keeping the pace is important, because if I run too fast, 6:30 minute per mile I would not be able to keep up the pace for the entire 10K. I would quickly lose my motivation if I became exhausted from running too fast.

Motivation is such a delicate balance. No wonder people have such a difficult time sticking to an exercise program. No one is easily motivated to go out and inflict pain on themselves. Even if they do feel better afterward. Climbing that mountain only because it is there only works for some people. For most people they would rather turn on the TV and watch a video made by someone else who actually did the hard work and actually did climb the mountain.





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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


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