Avoiding Procrastination

Running is funny. You love it when you do it, but sometimes the thought of it sickens us, right? Believe it or not, I’m really not the type of girl to love the planning in my running. It makes it seem like a chore and then the ‘day’ comes and I procrastinate.

Sound familiar? It’s okay! Fear not, here’s my top tips and thoughts on how to not do that.

Mind Over Matter

We’ve all heard it time and time again. But I’m afraid it’s true. The hardest part of running, most if not all runners will gladly tell you, is the mental battle.

You have to convince yourself. But let me break this down because it’s so much harder than that looks, despite how obvious it is. If you wake up on ‘run day’ and decide that tomorrow is better to run for one reason or another, that’s not convincing yourself.

It’s procrastination, pure and simple. Sorry!

Avoiding procrastination is a strange one when it comes to running because it totally and utterly depends on you, the type of person you are.

Which Runner Are You?

If you’re a planner, then you just need to learn (with time and practice like everything!) to schedule it and then do it. It’s tough talk, but that really is the crux of it.

If you’re a planner, then you will see that you do actually have time to go for a run, if you really think about it.

But you might find that you’re more of a spontaneous runner. By this, I don’t mean you’ve procrastinated the Wednesday evening run, you’ve been hit with that pityful guilt so you ‘spontaneously’ run Thursday morning before work.

I mean that you know you’re going to run twice this week, but you don’t know when. Then one day, you find yourself walking home and realising you will have 3 hours to spare between dinner time and the arrival of your boyfriend.

The Spontaneous Runner will see a perfect time slot for a run, not a Netflix session.

You’ll Feel Happy

Obviously, marathon training is a lot about going the distance, and yes I’m making a reference to the Bill Conti song, or more commonly known as the ‘Rocky tune’ here.

But avoiding procrastination isn’t about that. It’s about realising that everyone has the same 24 hours in a day. Being ‘too busy’ or ‘not having enough time’ are just poor excuses. But here’s the bonus. Yes, there is an actual advantage to becoming a spontaneous runner.

You will feel  happy. You’ll really love yourself even more for that spontaneous run when you least expected it and you just forced yourself to get up and go.

Running is about pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone. Running is about testing your personal and physical barriers. Running is about learning to tackle your own obstacles.

But it’s also about overcoming them. When you get out of your safe little cocoon of comfort, rise up, above and beyond those barriers.. it feels good!

You know all that happiness all you runners feel the buzz from? Add that to the spontaneity factor and you get the ‘feel good’ factor to the absolute max.

Even if you have a ‘bad run’ or it’s not as great as you anticipated, you’re still being kinder to your body than those Netflix bingers. Win win!

How do YOU deal with procrastination as a runner? Let me know in the comments below..