A rolling start: how to get back on your feet

“It’s not about how hard you hit, but rather about how hard you can get hit and keep coming back.”

While drastic, this line from “Rocky Balboa” doesn’t fail to represent an important aspect of things I learned throughout the years: striving for perfection guarantees frustration, but learning how to get back from missteps, mishaps and mistakes guarantees that the end-result will outweigh the process to reach it.

A relationship without fights is not a happy relationship… A happy relationship strives to work through fights and increase reciprocal empathy and mutual fullfilment. Right… I’m drifting off.

The point that I am trying to make is: don’t be afraid to start from behind when it comes to seeking your goals. While a detailed rundown of my competition running goals can be found on the sideboard of this site and my previous post, two paramount milestones for reaching them are a target weight of 72kg and the total distance of 1500km in 2023… My recent bad behavior has put me at 91kg on the scale, while 2022 was my worst running year since I started, with only 700km added to my stats.

It means I stumbled. It means I need to get back up. It means I have a chance to do a rolling start when the time comes to bolt through the first milestone in my running journey next July and this motivates the heck out of me.

In doing everything wrong, I now know more about what I can do right. My nutrition was off, my method for finding motivation to leave the house for a run was faulty, my focus was inconsistent at best and, most definitely, I didn’t seek enough help.

And out of this I got a daunting, overwhelming to-do list with things like seeking medical help, using a habit-tracking app, meditating, etc. etc. etc. which would not be the right way to go: if you want to achieve something, you should think about reducing complexity, not increasing it.

But here’s the thing about new-years resolutions: don’t be afraid to reinvent yourself during the year. If something doesn’t work, change it… And if it does, do more of it… But take small steps, because you live life every day and the fact that the earth just took another lap around the sun means absolutely nothing for your development as a person.