I was training for the 10K and really excited about my progress. I even mentioned the possibility of doing a marathon one day. A friend blurted out something to the effect of criticizing people who rush to do a big distance run and that your really aren’t a “runner” and shouldn’t be doing a marathon if its going to take you like 8 hours to compete it.

That apparently has stuck with me – that I’m not a real runner if I can’t run fast. Just another piece of fiction that’s running around in my head. But I have noticed that my runs are getting faster. The more I run, the faster I can go. Yeah, I know, that’s not rocket science, that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen, but now I’ve got numbers to prove it.

I ran my 10K on October 24 at a 15:50 pace. I ran 8 miles this week at a 13:15 pace. That’s a 2 minute improvement. Wow. Seeing it now makes me feel even more motivated!

My pace for runs for the last 4 weeks

I look and feel great!

I did everything wrong this week. I didn’t track what I ate. I didn’t eat small meals, I ate out A LOT, I let my self get to the point where I was STARVING before meals.

But I hit all my runs for the week, in a freaking snow storm. I LOVED my runs. I pushed myself and you know what, I look good and I feel great! I’m back on the “Integrity Wagon” and I have finally come to a place where I love myslef, where I can view this process as a journey to get fit, to be an athlete. It is no longer about the numbers on the scale. Those numbers are just a tool. Those numbers just tell me I’m on the right track or I need to be more committed. They are numbers, not a judgement on who and what I am.

I weigh 199lbs.

I look good and feel great.

I hit the gym for a 2 mile run. Nothing fancy, I wasn’t even gonna push myself. I’m trucking along and this older woman next to me commented that she really wished she could run like me. Imagine my astonishment. I think I’m a terrible runner and with a half marathon looming just two months away, I’m starting to freak out about it. We chatted for a bit and I told her that I started running 30 seconds at a time and built from there.

She then went off with her trainer and continued thinking. What is an “athlete”? Am I an “athlete”? What makes an “athlete”? I came home and actually looked it up. According to Dictionary.com, an “athlete” is someone who trains for a sport. It says nothing about being “good” or “the fastest” or “the best” or “the skinniest”.

I’m training for a sporting event, therefore, by default, I am an athlete. I have never seen myself that way. Once I took all the judgement out, my world became so much lighter, and I could actually say – I am an athlete.

On the road to the Half Marathon

How to Rebuild Your Integrity to Achieve Consistency

1. Have a goal with measurable results and milestone markers along the way
2. Start small
3. Schedule it!
4. Get it done first thing
5. Celebrate
6. There is no failure, just messes to clean up

Begin with a goal

I’m training for the MORE Half Marathon in April and once I committed to the run, I needed a running program right? I’ve done 10K, and a half marathon doubles the mileage so I’d need some way to get from Point A to Point B. So I did what I usually do, I asked the Google and found a program I thought would do the job. The problem was I really wasn’t at the right fitness level. This program had me starting off my week with a 8mile run. Heck no! So I limped along, struggling to get those miles in but since I wasn’t quite there yet, I was suffering and skipping runs. Then I hit on the idea of creating my own program from scratch. I had a goal, 13.1  miles, a specific time frame that goal would be achieved in, so I knew how much time I had to get there. So I literally drew myself a map, putting where I am today and where I needed to be on April 25 at the end. Then I marked off each week and each day and now I know exactly what I need to do to get to my goal. If you don’t have a goal, you don’t know where you’re going so you can’t possibly know how to get there. And with weekly and daily milestones, all I have to worry about is one day at a time and be consistent one week at time.

Baby steps

Every single productivity, weight loss and Fitness expert will tell you to start small and build on your progress. I’ve found that building integrity is no different. If you overwhelm yourself with to-dos and tasks and goals, you could very well freak out and get nothing done. Integrity is very much like a muscle. You’ve got to start small and build just like you would on a weight loss plan.

Pencil it in

So you’ve got your road map, your destination and goal set. You know what your milestones are. You know what you have to achieve each week. Now take those weekly actions and put it in your calendar, datebook, smartphone, whatever, at a specific time. Don’t say “I’ll fit in three runs this week”, because Friday will get here and you haven’t run and happy hour will be much more appealing than the treadmill.

Just get it over with already

You scheduled it, now just get it over with already, sheesh. Using the above happy hour predicament, if you got your runs done, achieved your milestones early in the week, you take the stress and pressure off yourself. Then you can go fo bonus runs, feel like you achieved something extra and just kick back and relax and just enjoy what you’ve accomplished.

Celebrate good times, c’mon!

So you got your goal, you got your milestones, you stated small, you scheduled your activities for the week – You did exactly what you said you were going to do. SUCCESS! You have integrity! AWESOME! You just kicked butt in the Integrity Game. Fantastic. Celebrate that sucker like it was going out of style! Put gold star stickers all over your calendar and roadmap. Have a glass of wine. Buy the Glee soundtrack. We are all fantastic at tearing ourselves down and wallowing in our failures. Most of us suck at celebrating our successes.

Just get over it

OK, so it’s the end of the week and you didn’t do what you said you were going to do. You didn’t achieve your milestones. What this means is that you didn’t have integrity this week. What it DOES NOT mean is that you are a bad person. It DOES NOT mean you suck. It just means you didn’t do something. That’s all. Under no circumstances should you use this as evidence that you can’t accomplish your goal. But rather use this as a gift to yourself, take stock of your week and really look at what got in your way. What can you change for next week? What can you realign to help you be successful?Maybe your goal really isn’t that important to you and you need to shift your focus. And do this without drama! You don’t need to beat yourself up over it, just fix it and move on.

Fortune Cookie Wisdom

“With integrity and consistency – your credits are piling up”

It was hard not to crack up upon reading that. I happen to be on a “first date” at the time and so there was the obligatory “… in bed” game that had to go on.  So not a sexy fortune. Once that subsided, I realized that this goofy little slip of paper just nailed the crux of my life struggles for the past few months (and OK, if I was honest with myself, the last few years).  Integrity and consistency have been a huge struggle for me in many areas, and it’s through running that I’m finding ways to reintegrate that into my life.

Integrity for me is doing what I say I’m going to do when I say I’m going to do it. Simple right? And without integrity, you can’t have any sort of consistency and without consistency, you can’t achieve any health or fitness goals. Thinking bigger, you can’t really achieve any goals without consistency which is developed through integrity.

I got to a place in my life where you really couldn’t count on my word. Yeah, I’d say, “sure I’ll do it” and what ever ‘it’ was never got done. Worst of all, I couldn’t count on myself. Every Monday morning it was the good ole “Oh I’ll start my diet today” or some other promise I knew I’d never keep.

But that began to change when I declared to a room full of people that I would train and run a 10K race. YIKES. You gotta put in the training hours to succeed in a goal like that. So I stared small and celebrated my wee tiny successes and I re-taught myself how to have integrity and how to be consistent.

Now the funny thing is, that training is bleeding into other areas of my life. I am now the person who if I say I’m doing X, X gets done. OK, fine, X sometimes does not get done how or when I originally planned, but it gets done nonetheless. Running isn’t only changing my body, but its changing my life.

The gym is lonely.

Everyone is in their own world, no one talks, people rarely smile and OMG I”m paying for this!

I wouldn’t pay for the privilege of going to happy hour to sit in a corner and drink my drink, why on earth am I paying for being lonely?

Then another thought hits me… Fitness is expensive. I have a gym membership because I can’t afford a treadmill. I’m sure all the unnamed-no-eye-contact masses around me at the gym have unused fitness equipment too. Like the exercise-bike-come-clothes-hanger in my livingroom.

So wheels are turning, thoughts are flying… what if I created a space where you could find fitness friends and swap fitness gear… interesting…

And “ReFit” was born.