Walking the hills

This past Sunday I went for what was probably my first run in nearly ten years. I blame my company perk Fitbit! I thought; how hard can it be? I could easily have climbed on my mountain bike and gone for a 100km ride without any real sweat – but was I in for a surprise!

As I made my way up what must have been the steepest hill on my 4,4km (only) run I remembered how running used to be a naturally easy thing to me and that once I was actually pretty good at it and I thought there must be some kind of lesson I can learn from this.

I wished I could have gone back a few years and maintained some level of consistency rather than finding another reason why I could no longer jog. Then over the weekend my colleague Joel wrote a post titled There is No Reset Button and it struck me – there really is NO reset button in life.

We only get one chance to do something the first time.  Thereafter we choose to continue or choose to stop. If you consistently work at something you will only get better at it – it’s inevitable. But if you are consistently doing nothing – then well – you going to do nothing – and something which seemed easy, even second nature a few years back is going to seem harder and more challenging the next time round.

So the next time you get to start something for the first time, keep at it, even if you have to walk the hills.