Running, Blogging and the Positive Feedback Loop
I woke up early this morning with a Bob Marley tune in my head. Something off Legend, I think it was. Those grooves are positively infectious. In any case, I got my sweats, got my dog and hit the street for another adventure in Beginning Running. We did our usual mile circuit, alternating between running and walking. My first goal is to run the whole distance. After that I may increase the number of days that I go. Either that or increase the distance, we’ll see. One thing I noticed, though, is that I haven’t had any soreness in my legs this week. I think now that the pain from last Wedneday’s outing was due to the ice on the sidewalks. Avoiding the ice somehow changed my natural stride and caused the excess muscle fatigue in my quadriceps. At least that’s what I think happened. So I’m not in as bad a shape as I at first thought.
Rattling around in my head as I ran, in addition to the Bob Marley, was the thought that one positive thing tends to lead to another; they tend to feed on one another. Like the fact that exercising regularly motivates me to eat healthier and vice versa. It’s all one big feedback loop. Understanding this could be one of the best guards against temptation. After all, viewed from this perspective doing a negative thing isn’t an isolated event. It will act as a drag on everything else in your life.
I also was thinking about blogging. Keeping a blog, or a journal of any kind, I guess, but espeically a public one, is a strange thing. It’s the creation of a public persona. No doubt smarter people than I have had many insightful things to say about this phenomenon, but what occured to me is that not only do I get to be the “hero of my own story,” as it were, but I’m also creating myself as I go. I’m actually using the act of writing about my life as a way to shape myself into the person I want to be.
So doing something positive for myself – running, for example – helps me in several ways. First, it’s empirically good for me. Second, the act of doing something positive for myself inspires me to do other good things. Third, choosing to write about that good thing is a way to create a public identity for myself as a person who does positive things – an identity that I then feel compelled to live up to.
The things you think about while running down the street early in the morning with Bob Marley tunes in your head.