Train Yourself - Part 1

I am sorry to inform you that you are an animal. I don’t mean that in the sense that you are overpowering as in “So and so is a real animal.” What I mean is that you are an animal not a plant. You are like dogs, cats, horses, and so forth. You can’t be a “couch potato” but you might be a “sofa sloth.”

Because you are an animal you can be “trained” to do things that you might not think possible. Most of you have probably tried to train a dog or some other pet to do tricks. We can apply the same concepts used to train other animals to train ourselves.

Pavlov is widely credited with doing the first research on conditioned responses. Perhaps somewhat apocryphal, the story was that he rang a bell each time he feed his dogs. After a while, the dogs would begin to salivate when the bell was rung whether or not they were given food. Pavlov was training the mind not the saliva glands by establishing a feeding ritual that the mind then responded to.

You can use rituals to train humans to behave in certain ways. When my kids were young we had a well established bedtime ritual which began about 5:00 in the afternoon and ended with them in bed at 7:00. I am sure that, if asked, they would rather have stayed up, but the food, the bath, the pajamas, the reading of a story and then going to bed seemed natural to them.

You want to run. You know intellectually that you need to get out there. You may have a schedule leading up to your next race. I hear people all the time saying, “I need to run.” You can, of course, force yourself to run, but it is much easier to train yourself to get out there.

I will over the next few posts discuss how you can train yourself to do your workouts. I am not talking about the training effects that come from the workout itself but about how you can change your behavior so that running is the most natural thing you do.

Keep Running!