My First 5Km

The original slogan of this platform was and is “don’t hate; motivate”, but that’s not always so easy, motivating that is. The biggest step has to be your mindset and from there on it’s just baby steps all the way. Literally, baby steps.

Now running a 5 km might not be the most impressive thing to accomplish, until you actually accomplish it. The best part? Tracking your progress and seeing your growth. Of course running in itself has it’s own benefits towards the body in blood flow, lung capacity improvement, fitness boost, weightloss and clearing your headspace, but this article is primarily focused on achieving it with your mindset. My personal story starts out with trying to run, period. I’ve never done running as a child, teenager or student, so I had no muscle memory to fall back on, it was learning a completely new skill. I still remember my first attempt, it took me 8 minutes to “run” around the block (about 1 km). It was the worst experience of my life, I was sweating profusely, my chest was on fire and I swore I was having an asthma attack, so I gave up. I didn’t run again for a whole while.

A year later I was offered a modeling contract on the condition that I lose some weight (I know right, rude, who needs them anyways) so I was given a personal trainer for a few months. She too saw that running was not for me, but thought it an important warmup means, so we started off running to the stop street and back (about 400m) 2 to 3 times. As I said in the beginning BABY Steps. Of course the modeling contract did not last long and with that the personal trainer also stopped, I miss her often though, she was amazing and a big source of motivation. So my motivation was lost once again. Later in the year I started jogging with my partner for his sake as an ex rugby player, so we managed to go to the park (700m) rest there for my sake, and back again (another 700m). I hated every moment of it, everytime. Again I stopped as my and his life changed with work and travels and things.

Another 6 months later, in the beginning of this year to be exact, my best friend started taking up running and I got motivated once again to get back into my exercise routine and started running to the park and back as a warmup, this continued for a few weeks. I feel very self conscious when running, I don’t always feel like I’m doing it right, sometimes I feel funny. So one day I was doing my warmup run again and the park I ran to was full of people for an event, so instead of stopping as usual, I felt embarrassed and ran right past them up until the first circle up the road. At that circle are a bunch of apartment blocks, so again, embarrassed, I didn’t stop, but ran right home, without realizing I just did my first 2km. That’s when the real motivation kicked in. If I can do 2, that means I’ll be able to do 3. A few weeks later that’s exactly what happened, I did my first 3km.

Eventually 3km became my warmup before exercising. For some reason I could exercise after 3, but not run 4km. My problem? My mindset: instead of telling myself to keep going, I’m telling myself I can do it. Instead of being forceful in telling myself to do something, I changed my perspective to the factor that I’m capable. I have the strength, the endurance and the confidence to overcome a challenge and today I did my first 5km, not because I had to, but because I could.

I feel this lesson can be applied to most things in life, baby steps are always crucial and a can so attitude always trumps a must do attitude. Just believe in yourself and start. You are your own biggest motivation.

Keep going, keep glowing, keep growing, you’re doing amazing.

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