Why I’ve Started My 2021 New Year’s Resolution Early and You Should Too.

2020 was supposed to have been the year that I got my sh*t together and started living.

I had spent the first half of the year waiting to have my Green Card application approved and then moved halfway across the globe, spending the rest of the the year getting settled and looking for work. Trapped as I had been in the chaotic holding-pen of the US Immigration system, taking care of myself and my own health and fitness were not exactly a priority for me in 2019. In fact, I can confidently say that during the 6 months of the year I was living alone in New Zealand, I ate more instant noodles than I ever had before. 2020 was going to be when I started living the rest of my life.

As fresh starts go, the year got off to a pretty great one. I spent the morning of Jan 1st doing a 5 mile hike. By early February, we had moved into a new apartment. I had a permanent base, I was eating healthily and I was finally keeping to a regular exercise regime.

I had begun dabbling with exercise again after arriving in the States, using the gym as a way to break up my days while I searched for gainful employment. On December 31st 2019, I vowed to make exercising regularly a focus of the coming year. At the gym, I had found running to be something I enjoyed. I resolved that by the end of the year I would be able to run at least 10km in one shot. So I slowly began upping my distance on the treadmill.

The first inkling I had that the year was not going to go to plan was the strange tingling sensation that started appearing in my lower legs in late February which turned out to be the start of shin splints. Seeing that the only thing to do was rest for 6 to 8 weeks or risk a stress fracture, I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to take some time off and pace myself when I got back to the gym.

When gyms in my area were shutdown in the middle of March, I was halfway through my rest period. At that point, I was relieved that I would be saving the expense of gym membership fees while I was injured. How lucky that this minor injury and state mandated shut down were overlapping.

Of course, the gym stayed shut a lot longer than it took for my shin-splints to heal. Then the year started skipping by, and aside from a handful of well-meaning jogs around my neighborhood, my fitness goals were all but forgotten. Sure, I’ve been taking some online beginners ballet classes over the past few months, but aside from a coupe of minutes of jumping at the end of class, those can’t really count as aerobic exercise.

As December approached, the guilt of this year’s failures began creeping in. Aided, I’m sure, by the fact that I recently lost my job due to Covid. It would have been so easy for me to let that failure and my loss of motivation to exercise continue to eat me up. But as I contemplated that first week of unemployment, I realized that the only thing holding me back from achieving is myself.

I already knew that I wanted to make exercise a bigger part of my life as we move into 2021, and that my new years resolution this year would be to run regularly throughout the year. I had decided that by December 1st. As I sat looking at the calendar app on my phone, I realized, why should I wait until January 1st to get started?

New Year’s Resolutions as a concept are built upon our human desire to assign arbitrary criteria to our goals. It’s the same drive that makes people start diets on a Monday. Assigning some form of order to the chaos that is life.

But waiting weeks to get started on a change that I’m serious about making seems silly. With each day that passed, all I would be doing is giving myself time to think of excuses as to why I don’t need to do this. Why I shouldn’t even try or why other things are more important.

If I’m truly serious about making regular exercise a priority, I should just get started.

Last Monday, I set my alarm for 6:30am and went for a run. It was cold, and barely light, and much harder than I remember it being months ago. But the point is that I did it once, and then two more times last week, and again this Monday.

Consistency is the key to making a habit of things. If all goes according to plan, by January 1st I’ll be well on my way to becoming one of those people who gets up early and runs. I’ll let you know how its going once we get there.