By the time I had found the Couch to 5K running plan, I had already spent quite a bit of time “thinking”.   Thinking about how hard it might be to run.  Thinking of every excuse why I shouldn’t  do it.  Thinking about my creaky knees.  Thinking about how my feet  hurt.  Thinking…thinking…..well, I’m here to tell you that as good as thinking is……thinking doesn’t make the scale move.    So I sat on my couch with my laptop and did a google search for  “learn to run a 5k” — and there it was — C25K.com.   I was amazed right off the bat by how I had to choose  the langauge for the training plan.  There were 28 other language choices besides English.  Ok, so I’ve traveled the world, I’m not mono-linguistic  But how impressed I was when I realized that there were people all around the world who had an “I wonder if I could learn to run?” moment JUST LIKE I HAD.    That was somehow comforting to me there on my couch in New Jersey.   I was setting out on a path that many others had taken, and I didn’t feel so alone anymore.  It’s also cool how my thoughts quickly moved from “I’m not alone”  to realizing….”hey, there’s a community of wanna-be runners out there, and I want IN”.  Kind of funny for someone who has been on the couch for so long, right?  When change happens, sometimes it happens FAST.   I think it harkens back to “waking up”.   I fought and delayed waking up juuust about a long as I possibly could.  But once I was awake, I wanted to go go go, so my weight could go go go away.  (LOL, been there too?)  Yeah, most of us have.

I had moved along the learning curve from DOUBT — to –> WONDER, and here I was ready to take the Leap of Faith into TRYING.  TRYING requires some work to set yourself up for success.  So I had to work on my brain some more, and work to change that “desire to get started” into “a committment to stick with it”  THEY ARE DIFFERENT THINGS!   I have to remind myself of that all the time.   So, I had to deal with something first.   I knew myself well enough that I KNEW I needed a promise….a promise FROM myself TO myself of one little HUGE thing.  [Right hand on heart, — Repeat Out Lout Diane — “no matter how hard this is,  YOU WILL NOT QUIT. ”    Now here came the hard part — Now promise yourself that you mean what you just said.

I printed the running plan, and made a schedule for myself.  I worked out which 3 days would be my running days, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday.  I then added “running” into my Outlook Calendar typically early in the morning before work and blocked out the time — Yeah, I treated these appointments with myself with as much importance and respect as I would an appointment with anyone else.  Not to be broken, or forgotten!

Peter took me to Dicks Sporting Goods and I bought new Asics sneakers.  These were my running shoes — only to be worn when I was running.  This sounds silly, I know, but I will tell you that to this day, when I see those sneakers, I feel strong, I feel different than I do when I wear any others shoes or sneakers. Those sneakers are part of the New Me.  They are special, and they are a marker in my life that I’m on a path…..a path to a place where I respect myself, where I say positive things about myself, where I value myself.  Who knew an ordinary pair of sneakers could take on so much power, one mile at a time.

So all these baby steps played a role in setting me up to begin TRYING.  TRYING to be different today than I was yesterday.

Ciao for now … Diane