The Lion in The Gym

For over 15 years now I’ve been going to the gym. Initially the habit was hard to build: a few months steady, then a gap of several months. Then again for some months, dropped out a bit, and so on.*

Eventually, the habit stuck, and I built a steady gym rhythm of three to four times per week which I kept up without fail.

Then I started running outside.

I’d been running on treadmills for years as part of my gym routine. I thought I’d built up quite a running stamina. Not so. I nearly died when I was on a trip and tried to do a 30 minute run in a park.

Running outside is a totally different ballgame than running inside in a gym. Some of the reasons for that are physical, but the mental aspect fascinates me the most.

Pumping yourself up to actually GO to a gym is half the difficulty. Your mind will often throw up excuses why you can skip, or go later, or go tomorrow, or next week: you went yesterday. You have a busy day. You’re on a trip. You just got home from a trip. You didn’t sleep well. You have a sore left toe.

Part of becoming “skilled” at going to the gym is to learn to ignore all this mental chatter. Just do it(which is why Nike’s slogan is so brilliant and timeless). Once you’re there, everything will work out fine.

So it is with running outside. But… the mental hurdle to overcome is on a totally different level. Hauling your ass to a gym is a walk in the park compared to dragging yourself out of bed at 5 am for a 10k run when it’s dark, raining, and zero degrees Celsius. Oh, and then, of course, there’s also the actual run to do!

Compare that to packing your bag, making it to your local (heated!) gym, and doing a bunch of exercises on your shiny abdominals and left inner thy muscle. Not too hard, right?

I’ve come to believe the mental training of throwing yourself out “into the wild” for a run, several times per week, regardless of the circumstances, is an overlooked part of the advantages of running. It helps build your mental stamina to overcome ever steeper challenges.

These days, I mostly run outside every other day and do exercises in my home on my non-running days. But sometimes, when I’m staying in a hotel for example, I hit the gym. There’s no mental hurdle to get myself there, it almost feels like a treat. And once I’m there, I can’t help feeling like a wild lion playing amongst a group of domesticated kittens. Roar!

** This, in my experience, is how (difficult) habits get built: it takes a long period of time where you fall of the bandwagon quite a few times. But keep getting back to it over and over again, and eventually the habit sticks. This process can take months or even years though. It’s been like this for me with quitting drinking, meditation, writing, and many other things.*

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