How Endurance Runners and Walkers Can Find Time to Work Out – Perfect Day

Finding time as a runner or walker to work out can be challenging, especially if you are training for a marathon, half marathon, or other endurance race. Here is a trick for finding that time.

Trick

Visualize your perfect day, which includes your running or walking workout, and your brain will find the time.

Details

Fact: Your unconscious mind drives much of your behavior.

Want proof? Consider all the steps that someone must take to go to work each morning — everything from eating breakfast and showering to getting dressed and driving. Many of these activities require very little from the conscious mind. “On automatic” is a popular phrase to describe this.

Fact: Your unconscious mind is susceptible to suggestion by visualization.

Want proof? Consider what happens when people see a scary movie. Perspiration increases. Heart and breathing rates increase. Pupils dilate. And these are all in reaction to something that the conscious mind knows is not real! But the unconscious mind prepares for fight or flight.

You can leverage these two facts to get the behavior that you want — taking time for a running or walking workout — by visualizing your perfect day and including your workout in that visualization.

Here are some best-practice tips for visualization: (1) Visualize only once a day. (2) Spend no more than 5-10 minutes on the visualization. (3) Include every little detail possible. (4) Infuse the visualization with emotion. (5) See yourself through your own eyes, not as an outsider. (6) Focus on or beyond the end result.

Best-practice tips 1 and 2 are relatively self-contained, but here is how to apply best-practice tips 3 through 6 specifically to the workout portion of your day.

Tip 3: Examples of including “every little detail possible” in your visualization of your workout include:

• hearing the birds singing in the trees under which you are running or walking;
• seeing the automobile headlights in the distance;
• smelling the grass clippings of a lawn that was mowed the day before your workout.

Tip 4: Examples of infusing your visualization “with emotion” include:

• feeling the smile that grows on your face as cool, fresh air hits it;
• feeling the joy of sharing good conversation while working out with your training partner;
• feeling the endorphin rush at the end of a long workout.

Tip 5: Examples of seeing yourself “through your own eyes” include:

• looking down at your waist to adjust your hydration belt;
• seeing a hydration bottle in your hand as you bring it to your mouth for a drink;
• seeing the sweat on your own hands at the end of your run or walk.

Tip 6: Examples of focusing “on or beyond the end result” include:

• pressing the stop button on your watch or GPS wrist unit at the end of your workout;
• feeling how good you will feel right after your run or walk;
• feeling how good you will feel throughout the remainder of the day after your early-morning workout.

How It Works

By “showing” your unconscious mind what your perfect day is, this trick makes your unconscious mind drive the “on automatic” behavior you want.

write by Theodora