Making it a Habit

The baby monitor in our bedroom clicks on and I can hear the sound of the air conditioning in Cam's room against the speakers.  Ugh, the baby is up.  Cam's whimpering starts and I climb out of bed and trudge over to her room.  It's 5:30 in the morning.  My plan was to wake up at 6AM and go running.  I push open the door to Cam's room and find she is still asleep. "Poor baby," I think, "She must be having a bad dream."  I lay my palm on her back and then pull her soft, plush leopard printed blanket back over her before quietly tip-toeing out of the room.  5:33, I sigh.  If I go back to bed now I can get 27 minutes of sleep.  Thinking I will wake up magically in less than a half hour, I plop down in bed, pull up the covers and snuggle next to Josh.

Baby whimpering over the monitor again.  I look at the clock.  7:30AM. Damn.
Did I set the alarm?  No.
Can I make it to the gym to run before Cam's swim lessons at 9? Nope.
Does this happen nearly every morning?  Uh huh. Yep.

I need to make exercise more of a habit.  Right now, I perform reasonably well athletically and that is only training (confession time), 2 days a week.  Yep, during marathon training, on average, I would run a 30-35 minute run during the week and a long run on Saturday morning.  I did this and still got a 5:16 marathon time.  What can I do with more training? 

Enter www.habitforge.com.  A friend of mine sent me this link saying that he found it helpful, so I checked it out.  The premise is simple.  You set up a free account, you type in what you would like to make a habit out of and then the site emails you everyday asking if you were successful at the task the day before.   You click yes or no.  The goal is to go 21 days straight and if you make it, your habit will have a real chance of becoming permanent.

The first habit I wanted to establish:  flossing daily.  I know, it's gross that I don't do so already, but I bet a lot of people out there are flossing failures.  So far, I have made it 5 days in a row, flossing. 

The second habit: sticking to my triathlon training schedule.  The schedule calls for 6 training sessions a week, something I will need to work very hard at to accomplish.  Since accountability increases success, I have made this goal public on the habitforge. com website.  If you choose to join the site, let me know and I will send you a link to keep tabs on me.  Hopefully, I can pay you back by keeping tabs on you for something, too.