“He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

I used that quote earlier in a reply to a friend, and it got me thinking how relevant it is to the 31 Days of Fitness challenge. Not two days into it, and I’ve met with some concern over the details to my plan.

Comments like: “You know, there is other factors you need to consider. There is diet and sleep and stress and blah blah blah…”

I understand all of this, and in no way do I think that just by exercising I am going to loose weight and get healthy in 31 days. Diet plays just as important a role as working out, and the importance of sleep is becoming more and more recognized by the medical community for the part it plays in a healthy life. Then there’s other things like mindfulness and meditation and frequent trips to the doctors…

I get it, I’m tracking all that stuff.

There’s a reason I’m starting with exercise only this month. You see, this isn’t the first time I have attempted a 30 day challenge to exercise every day. When I attempted it then, I’d also try to start eating right, and give up sugar and try to do it all at once. The result was I would struggle and fail ten days or so into it.

There’s too much to do at once. Trying to change all your habits at one time is tough and takes will power beyond imagine to be successful. I ain’t got that.

Let’s use an exercise analogy to explain exercise (if that makes any sense). Let’s say you want run a marathon, but you haven’t run at all in a long while. You wouldn’t just show up and and run the race. You would slowly train up for it. Starting by running a few miles and increasing your distance as you went along. I’m guessing at all of this of course, I’ve never trained for a marathon.

But my point is that I’ve tried this in the past, and it was way too much. So this time I’m focusing on one thing at a time, trying to establish a habit and then moving on to the next area I need to improve, starting with exercise.

Maybe there will be a sugar free 30 days in the future, or 30 days of meditation. Who knows? I’m just knocking down one domino at a time, and this month it’s the work out domino.

Because this is a marathon, and if I’m lucky, I’ll have about thirty to forty years o to reach the finish line. So there is no need in trying to change everything at once, with the result being that I just make myself outright miserable.

So don’t expect any dramatic before and after pictures in 28 days, cause it ain’t gonna happen. Come to think of it, I doubt I’ll ever include an after pic, since that would infer that I am finished. We’ll just call all them all “during” pictures. I wonder if Nietzsche ever knew that his philosophy would apply to health and fitness?

I doubt it, because he also said “There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.”

So I guess that means everything I just said could be bullshit.