This is my 7th year in a row.  I have been running on a regular basis for the last 6 years. Consistently.

While I was never a stuff who could be capable of running a full marathon, I have run 3 times Tata Mumbai Marathon(TMM) out of these 6 years. How did I do that? What motivated me to push myself so far to accomplish a running feat that I would never imagine all my life before doing it?

Not just motivation

If you ask me, it wasn’t just the result of mere motivation. You could be motivated by watching a inspiring movie, or after reading a book on a runner(done that!).  But, that won’t be enough to push your for 5-6 hours to keep running and cross the finish line.

So, what is it ? If it is not mere motivation, then, how did I do it? And how you too can do it for the sake of fitness and good health ?

Not a one day affair

The most important thing to remember in fitness is that it is not a one day affair. Your fitness is a life long affair. There fore, if you are setting up yourself against a timeline to accomplish something as concrete as losing weight or building your stamina, will power etc, then inculcate discipline.

Motivation is like air that you inhale for sometime and you have to exhale it afterwards.  It doesn’t last long. Motivation is driven by the germination of deep positive and optimistic emotions.

And our emotions are always fluctuating. They will be on high today, and low the next day. So, you can’t go by your emotional thing.

Inculcate Self Discipline

On the other hand, working with discipline is about having a plan and hammering that plan everyday keeping in mind the destination. You like it some times and you won’t like it after some time doing. But, you still do. You don’t wait for the wave of positive emotions to strike back.

Have your plan in black & white

You don’t ask or explain yourself again and again whether you should be doing it or not. You have set a plan on paper and keep executing it.

No Excuses

You don’t look for excuses. You look for the ways to get the task accomplished.  You don’t wait for the perfect moment to arrive. But you do it because ot has to be done at any cost.

You see there is a 180 degrees shift of your mindset from doing it out voluntarily to pushing it during the tough times. 

Our efforts are incremental. We can’t accomplish our fitness goals of we aren’t regular. And regularity comes from enforcing discipline. The great runner, Eliud Kipchoge says that only disciplined ones are free, rest are slaves to their moods and emotions.

Therefore, you need to come out of the mindset of moods and start doing it out of your duty. Only then you will the change in you, in your body weight and in your overall attitude towards Life.

In these 6 years, I have a huge shift in the way I work or how I deal with my relationships. And all this could be attributed to the spillover effects of being a disciplined athlete.

May be thats why people around you start to respect you even more when they come to know that you are a marathon runner. Because they also know that accomplishing such things would have taken a lot of discipline and the traits of a great character.

In my opinion, marathon is for anyone who wishes to develop a strong character for life. Marathon running teaches us to be strong and disciplined and not wait for the motivation.

This is therefore like conquering your own imperfect self to a certain extent.