What is your goal?

If you want to do something, you have never done before, start by setting a goal.  Goals should be achievable but still require a bit of effort. I like short term goals.  Sometimes my goals seem silly. One of my goals is to stop drinking diet pop. To get there I set little goals.  I will only have a pop three days out of the week.  When there are days that I think I can't go without, I set a goal to first drink two bottles of water before I have a pop.  By bottles I mean two 32 oz. bottles.

I do the same thing when I am exercising or running.  When I first started running, I could run for about 2 blocks before I thought I was going to have a heart attack.  I slowly worked myself up to a mile over the course of several weeks. I was stuck at a mile for almost a year.

At the time I happened to be going to a Nurse Practitioner, who was also a runner, and I told her how frustrated I was that I couldn't go any farther. Karen told me it was all in my head.  Running is a mental and physical challenge.  That conversation was actually life changing for me.  It didn't tell me how I was going to do it, just that I could do it.  The next time I went out for a run I started setting goals.  Lots of them.  Every single time I went out to run.  I would set goals to run my mile and then run another block and then I could walk the next block. I would run a block, walk a block, run a block walk a block.  Then the next week I would say okay today I can run two blocks, walk one block and on an on.

So what is your goal?  To walk the 5K, to jog the 5K, to jog/walk the 5K, to not come in last.  That is always my goal.  I have actually run two races where I was last, dead last.

I saw this on a t-shirt on Pinterest:

I run
I may be slower than a heard of turtles running through peanut butter,
but I run.

PS. when I say I run, that is sort of an exaggeration, I am more of a jogger and I am definitely a walker/jogger.