“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
Sometimes starting for the day seems very daunting. If you have a job and kids, the further you go into your day, the more difficult it becomes to fit in structured exercise. So I have developed a saying, based on the opposite of the old Nike logo.
"Just do it" served a purpose. In addition to selling a lot of running shoes, it was short and simple. But haven't you noticed how many mornings and evenings the thought of taking an hour to change, do whatever your scheduled workout is for that day and then showering and changing back seems kind of daunting. So on those days, I don't think of it like that. Instead I flip the saying on its head and say "just don't do nothing."
It's too easy to convince ourselves that if we can't do everything we have planned then we can't do anything we have planned, but that thinking is not only counterproductive, it also ignores a truth about fitness that I learned this year.
This year was, as I've written previously, a tough year. With injuries and setbacks I never was able to get any consistent rhythm with training and as the big races on my schedule kept getting dropped, my motivation sagged. With the routine I developed last year, whatever discipline I had left, and a lot of encouragement from my coach, I hung in there week by week hitting at least a few of the daily workouts she scheduled for me. And I learned something new to me: although it takes a lot of work and consistency to gain fitness, it doesn't take all that much work to maintain fitness. Even at the worst of the training troughs this year, I was still able to crank out 30-40 mile rides, some 1500m open water swims and as for running -- well the run fitness went down the most for me. But it would keep coming back slowly with every injury-free training block I had.
So that's why my new mantra is "Just don't do nothing." If you have two workouts scheduled, just do one. If you have one scheduled, do half. Tell yourself that you'll just start and see how you feel. Chances are that once you've started, you'll go ahead and finish. A body in motion stays in motion so just start moving and see what happens. You don't need to be perfect. You don't need to do a lot. Just don't do nothing. And see how that works out.