When I was little, every couple years my mom would save up and buy us tickets to the theatre.  She would buy the tickets well in advance and then put it on the calendar and we would countdown to the day we got to go.  Then when the day came we would dress up really fancy and go for dinner somewhere downtown before the show.  The fact that my mom ensured we knew that the tickets were something we saved for and made a big deal out of getting to go has helped me to really appreciate things in my life and the countdown taught us to not take things for granted.  To this day I still get that same childlike excitement for things like that because I truly appreciate how fortunate I am to get to experience them.  They feel like a big deal and special still.

The flip side of this is how to feel when the event actually happens.  If you’ve been counting down to something for 4 or 5 months (or more) and have built it up in your mind two things can happen:

      1. The show/event/trip/goal etc might not live up to the hype.
      2. You won’t know what to do with yourself when it’s done.

 

I’m pretty good at managing my expectations, but it’s easy to imagine that seeing your favourite band in concert is going to be life-altering and have it turn out to be…well, nowhere close.  Or that just because everyone else can’t stop raving about the latest musical doesn’t mean that you’ll agree.  Same goes for reaching your goals.

We are conditioned to believe that if we look good, we will feel good.  We’re fed somewhat arbitrary numbers on what we should weigh, how many calories we should eat, how much time we should spend exercising and what pants size we should be.  We’re convinced that if we break our dependence on carbs and sugar, or give up “junk food”, or only eat in a small window of time that we’ll finally cross that threshold to inner peace and happiness.

But guess what? The two things no one is telling you is that, achieving a goal probably isn’t going to look how you think it will, and you’re not really done when you get there.

This past weekend I walked a marathon.  I signed up to run it earlier in the year but my legs just have not liked running much most of this year so I wasn’t able to train.  Since the race was a virtual event I was going to receive the “race kit” – medal, t-shirt, stickers, socks – regardless of whether or not I completed the event and I know that if that medal came into my house and I didn’t DO the race I would beat myself up, so I decided I was going to walk it.

In truth, I was very cocky about how difficult I expected that to be.  I wouldn’t say I thought it would be EASY, but I definitely didn’t think it would be ‘hard’ either.  In my mind, I walk all the time!!  I can just slow down and be totally fine.  Ya, no.  I’m used to walking my dogs, who stop to sniff something every 10 feet…or walking to work when I’m carrying a bag and only need to go 1.3 Km.  Walking for HOURS is a whole different animal.

On top of that, I didn’t think when I did my first marathon it would be walking…I wanted to run across that finish line and adjusting my expectations of myself was not easy.  Also, when it was done, this giant thing that had been looming there, keeping me trudging towards it, was just suddenly gone.  The euphoria of finishing sort of just poofs and now I’m just here again, with nothing on the horizon.  Don’t get me wrong, I LOVED that walk and still have a bit of a high from it, but the toughest thing I didn’t see coming about both physical and mental health stuff?  It’s never finished.  Accomplishing goals, getting stronger, achieving personal bests, maintaining a healthy lifestyle…all requires consistent work.  Forever.

You can kill yourself in the gym, forgo sugar entirely, live on 1300 calories a day and drink gallons of water for months preparing yourself for an event or goal…but if you want to keep the results of those months of work when that goal is done, you have to keep doing some work.  Which, once the initial motivator is gone, is not nearly as exciting or motivating.

I’ve talked before about what I envisioned myself looking like when I hit my goal weight and how it NEVER lived up to what I imagined when I got there, but this pretty much applies to everything…getting the dream job you wanted, running an Ironman, going on a long-overdue vacation, buying a house or a car, getting plastic surgery…none of the things we work towards are really the end goal.  They’re just a layover on the way.

I thought for sure that people who are really into fitness eventually just do it without thinking about it – that it gets to the point when they NEVER consider skipping a workout, that it would become just like breathing; you don’t have to think about it, you just do it.  But people don’t just get up and run 5km every morning – they have a reason for doing it that motivates them. They plan it, prepare accordingly and prioritize it in their schedule.  No one is just out there part-way through a run suddenly realizing “Oh hey! I didn’t even notice I left the house!”  They make a conscious choice to do it for reasons that work for them…they have a why. Without finding a way to stay excited and motivated, at no point will any of the things I do become self-driven or automated,

And sure, of course, there are some people who love fitness so much that they don’t consider or ever have the desire to skip a workout…but I can promise you that they have other things they are trying to do that they do struggle to implement; that they need to find a “why” for.

If you want to become a runner, I highly recommend signing up for a race so that you have a goal…but if you want to STAY a runner, that goal is not going to be what keeps you running.  For me, I have to have a race coming up or a goal I’ve committed to, or I don’t do it consistently enough.  I love to run and I’m a better me when I do it consistently, but I don’t make the time when it’s just for me (I know, I know, working on it).  So I sign up for races, ones I’m excited about and I tell people I’m doing them or recruit people to join so I have accountability.

And when I’m finished I plan for another one.

When I hit my weight loss goal, I didn’t know what to do with myself…I had NEVER in my life done that healthfully.  I have always either been dieting OR binge eating and not caring at all about it…but this time I did it slowly and without starving myself.  I still wasn’t where I wanted to be with strength though, so I shifted my focus completely onto working out to be strong and healthy.  Now I focus on the goal to be able to successfully strength train and run.  On being able to build muscle.  Being able to set more personal bests on how much I can lift.

And I also focus now on helping other people learn what I have – how to live healthfully without their lives revolving around counting calories and losing weight, how to exercise without it being a full time job and how important it is to lift heavy shit.

The toughest thing I didn’t see coming wasn’t that weight loss is best done slowly and actually should include foods you love.  It wasn’t that running was going to be a seemingly endless cycle in frustration for me, but that I’d love it so much that I’d be willing to push through.  And it wasn’t even that there is no end to the sleezy people willing to capitalize on those desperate for health.  It’s that we still have to keep going beyond the goals we set when we have no idea what’s coming next, because accomplishing a goal that at one point in your life you never dreamed you could isn’t the hard part…it’s not stopping when you’ve done it.