September 9th 2018

Today I completed 21 consecutive days of running at least five kilometres every single day. Three weeks ago I set myself the challenge in an effort to create a habit. It’s said that it only takes 21 days to turn something into a habit, so I put that to the test.

Of course, there were days where I didn’t want to run. There were days when I thought I wasn’t going to be able to run. There were days when, for whatever reason, I didn’t even get out for a run until 11 o’clock at night. But no matter what happened throughout the course of my day, I always found time to go out running.

One time I even went out twice because my running watch didn’t track the first one.

I was just freakishly determined to accomplish it. There are so many things into which I throw myself but rarely follow through. This time I wanted to follow through.

So I just stopped making excuses. Realistically no matter what kind of shit happened over the last three weeks, I always had at least half an hour to go for a run. And because I wasn’t challenging myself to do any more than 5km, a half hour was all I needed.

And so I changed the way my days work. In the same way that each day I cannot go to sleep until I’ve written a blog post, I taught myself to not be able to rest until I’d been for a run. That way, throughout the day all I could think of was “where and when am I going to run today”

And changing my mentality changed my behaviours. And here I am. 21 days later, having run every single day without fail.

No, that’s not healthy, but I didn’t really do any super long runs, and I also didn’t do super fast runs, so I wasn’t overexerting myself, I don’t think.

I’m happy that I reached my goal, but I do now have an interesting dilemma:

Do I stop?

I mean, 21 days is close to a month… and a month would sound better than 21 days. And then an entire calendar month would sound better, so I’d have to continue, and by that point, I may as well just do two whole months.

I know I shouldn’t. But I do kind of want to. And doesn’t that just prove that the 21-day thing worked? Because now it’s a habit. Now I want to include it in my every day life. And that was the entire point of this challenge in the first place: to make running habitually part of my life.

So, do I try to carry on the streak, or just accept that “running more” is good enough?

Until tomorrow, I guess we’ll find out in 24 hours.

Jacn