Consistency is commonly said to be the secret—the secret to success, athletics, or perhaps even a long life full of rainbows and unicorns and cookies. Along with this, people also often say that consistency is not sexy. Too true. In fact, I would say that consistency is downright boring. Maybe this explains why I struggle with it, except for consistently avoiding consistency or consistently eating cookies, which I am literally doing right now.
Around the beginning of the year, when I was setting my goals and reflecting on the past year, I popped into the excel spreadsheet where I keep a record of my day-to-day and overall training in order to tally up my mileage, elevation gain, and training hours for the year. I like to compare these metrics from year to year. I found that I hadn’t filled it in since early May or so when I finished my one and only athletic goal for last year—running the Cuerda Larga.
That’s not to say I had been completely sedentary. Throughout the year, I had been running, hiking, climbing, and doing yoga and some strength training. What I hadn’t been doing was recording it in a central place: it was all scattered about on different apps.
At first, you might think, “Fantastic! Way to just live your life free from the incessant data-heavy task-master that is a GPS- and heart-rate-enabled device.” But I disagree to some extent. For one, since I stopped racing long ago, I’ve never really been a “run by the watch” type. I mostly turn it on, run roughly the amount of time and or distance I want—more if I feel good (often) and have the time (less often) and less if I don’t feel good (sometimes) or am in a rush (like everyday).
So, I spent a good part of my time that first week in January compiling data from across apps and devices. I didn’t really think much about what I would find, because, of course, I had been doing things. I knew it. The evidence was literally on this blog even. What an incredibly naïve attitude. What I found were large swathes of days with no activity whatsoever—no running, no hiking, no strength training, no yoga, no anything other than, I assume, the walk to the train to work and back. What went from a casual way to procrastinate under the ruse of prepping for my year ahead was starting to make me a little nervous. Would I surpass my metrics from 2020, as I had been doing the past several years? At that point, I was thinking that it wasn’t likely.
I suppose this is why the expression, “What gets measured, gets managed” exists. I hadn’t been managing anything, unless you consider “manage” in the sense of “make it through” because that is really what I had been doing the last couple years—managing my ever-changing schedule by the skin of my teeth. I’ve been doing the dance of disappearing hours, so it’s no surprise that my ability to be consistent had been suffering and that my life had devolved into that other “c” word—chaos. Okay, maybe I’m being a bit dramatic.
In the end, I did find that I ran more miles this year than previous year, which is also not surprising. Running is one of those things that is easy for me to be consistent with because I have a long history of fitting it in where I can. I had been running in whatever slot of time I could find in a given day, be it 5:30 in the morning, early afternoon, or the evening, in between classes when I was teaching, or to work. But I wasn’t giving myself time for all that extra stuff—the flexibility and mobility work, the strength training—and I just knew I was on my way to injury. Sure enough, I had a recurrence of an old achilles/heel problem due primarily to tight calves, most easily fixed and avoided by…guess what…massage, stretching, and strengthening certain muscles.
After recovering through the end of December, I created my own personal January challenge called Just Do the Extras, which encompassed a bit of flexibility, mobility, and strength work every day from January 10 to January 31, building on what I had been doing for injury recovery. For extra, let’s say, accountability, I decided to post what I did each day on my Instagram. Each of those 22 days, I did something—foam rolling, yoga, kettlebell and exercise band workouts—and diligently, and finally begrudgingly, posted my accompanying photos.
On January 31, I was happy to post my last #justdotheextras photo. “Thank goodness to be done with all this consistency,” I thought as I hung up my foam roller and went back to lolling about on the couch. Not really, though. While “enjoy” might be too strong of a word, I felt satisfied with fitting in the foam rolling and the yoga and the strength exercises. I recovered very quickly from my injury and have been feeling, well, pretty limber and energetic.
I was, however, so very sick of posting and looking at all those photos consistently cluttering up my Instagram feed. Where were the mountains, the snow, the sunrise runs in the park? The excitement? The adventure? Who is this person wearing, let’s face it, mostly the same clothes every day, flopping around on the ground? Make her go away and bring back the fun one!
Now that it is February, I am looking forward to stopping this relentless parade of awkwardly staged and executed photos. Though, I’m not planning to stop my pursuit of consistency with my extras. I kind of like them, as boring as they may be. From the inside, they are tolerably boring, like waiting for the bus. From the outside, I do think it’s important to acknowledge that these are less “extras” and more “essentials.” They are part of what facilitates all those adventures I love to see, but let’s just say, I have no desire to watch myself wait for a bus and neither should anyone else.
