I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:

I exercise every day because I lack the discipline to take a day off.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I’d love to hear your comments.

We talked about writing. Since that topic encompasses everything else that we both live and breathe, the conversation covered a lot of ground.

She talked about inspiration and the nocturnal activities of her particular muse. There was a voice that came to her one night to dictate notes for years’ worth of writing projects. I speculated about the creative unconscious, the unknown workings of the mute machinery of our brains that collects, organizes, catalogs, and stores images, sounds, smells, emotions, and abstract ideas and then assembles them into dreams, long-term memories, and all the wonders of fantasy. I wondered why she was so eager to give the credit for her brilliance to something outside herself.

I told her about the lessons I was learning from helping other people figure out how not to hide their lights under bushels. She remarked that I seem to get better and better at giving advice without wasting a lot of time listening to what I’m saying.

I told her a long-winded story about losing weight and finding discipline, and of my endless quest to apply what I’d learned to my writing practice. Simple rules. Do something every day. Everything counts. And the new mantra that I’d picked up from a fitness podcast called Fat 2 Fit Radio—If you want to be fit, emulate the diet and habits of a fit person. Don’t promise you’ll eat better tomorrow or that you’ll go back to the gym next week.

There’s a broader lesson in that axiom, I think, for the writer, the artist, or anyone who aspires to do more, to be better, to claim his gift and follow its implications. When do you want it? Someday, or now? I gave her a homework assignment—write 400 words on the topic of our lunch date. She dared me to do the same. I carried the assignment home, took it for a seven-mile run around the park, and tucked it under my pillow when I went to bed. When the next work day was nearly done, I wrote this blog post. But I could have written only this:

Start living your life TODAY as the person that you ultimately want to be.

Image: Maggie Smith / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

At the end of last November, in an effort to jump-start a weight-loss regimen that had stalled, I made up my mind to walk twice around the loop at Memorial Park every day for the month of December. November 30 was a Monday, so I started one day early for good measure. The next day, just in time for my “official” December Project kickoff, the weather turned nasty for two solid weeks. December 1, it was raining and 45 degrees by evening. Then a cooling trend set in. By Thursday, there was talk of snow. I woke up Friday morning to moderate flurries.

At first, denial seemed like a comfortable attitude toward the weather. It wasn’t as if I could do anything about it. But a friend called mid-morning to warn me that it would get progressively worse as the day wore on. “If you must go, you should do it soon.” So I bundled up in two or three layers of shirts, a scarf, knit cap, a windbreaker, and my warmest running shorts. I give up the shorts when the weather gets so cold that ice starts to form on my skin, and not a minute sooner.

Snow was beginning to accumulate when I arrived at Memorial Park. There were plenty of parking spaces to choose from. In the course of 6½ miles, I encountered perhaps a dozen other people. Half of those were sightseers. They’d pull off the road, get out of the car, look at the falling snow—and the crazy man in the shorts—for a few minutes, and then get back in the car and take off in search of somewhere warm.

But the other half…those were my tribe! I recognized some of them as park regulars. With one in particular, a man in his late 50s, I’d had a mutual smile-and-nod pact for a year or two. But on that snowy December morning, I looked up to see him coming toward me with a big grin on his face. It felt like the right moment to solidify our bond, so as soon as we were within earshot, I said, “It’s days like this when you find out who’s serious.”

He said, “Hey, I’m from Colorado. This is like a nice spring day.” We shared the laugh and went our separate ways. A mile and a half later, we met again in front of the tennis center. We compared notes on which parts of our bodies had gone completely numb. There was a look of pride and satisfaction in his eyes that felt familiar.

When we were ready to break for our cars, he said, “See you tomorrow?”

I said, “Count on it.”

If you find something you love doing that’s good for your health, your self‑esteem, your sanity, and your spirit, you might become obsessed. It’s okay. You’ll be in good company.

I headed to the park for my walk early today because my first Learn to Row class was tonight. I arrived there around 3:30, the hottest part of the day. I didn’t have to wait long for relief from the heat, though. The sky clouded over, and then about halfway through the first lap, it started to sprinkle. It didn’t rain for very long—maybe about 10 minutes—just enough to get me miserably wet. Then the sun came back out and turned all the fresh rain into a layer of hot steam that hovered over the trail.

Image: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It was too humid to dry out from the wetting, but it didn’t matter, because another one was coming anyway. As I got to the last half-mile leg of the 6½‑mile walk, the sky opened up. This time, it was more than a sprinkle. The torrential rain continued until about the time I arrived back at my car.

I wiped down my iPod as well as I could with my soggy sweat towel and threw it in the trunk of the car. I grabbed my gym bag and headed for the locker room in the tennis center. Then it dawned on me that I hadn’t brought an extra pair of shoes—I’d planned to put my running shoes back on to go to rowing class. No time to go home for another pair, though, so I resolved to endure wet feet for the next few hours. I showered, toweled off, dressed, and then squished my poor feet back into the sodden shoes.

I’ve tried to find a lesson in today’s outing, but I’m drawing a blank. If you decide to commit to exercising every day—or sticking to any rigorous plan of action—there will be days when you have to walk around in wet sneakers, or the moral equivalent thereof. But you will have done what you set out to do. Maybe the lesson here is that not every day contains a lesson. Some days you just have to get through.

In 2008, I attended a lecture by Dr. Henry Lodge, one of the authors of Younger Next Year, a book that purports to offer ideas to help men fend off some of the physical symptoms of aging. The central theme of Dr. Lodge’s talk was a point that might seem counterintuitive: that we need more exercise as we get older, not less.

In the question-and-answer session that followed his presentation, someone asked Dr. Lodge, “So how much exercise is the right amount?” He replied that although no one has nailed down a precise, scientific answer to that question, a good rule of thumb might be four days a week in your 40s, five days a week in your 50s, and six days a week from your 60s on.

I was already exercising nearly every day before I heard Dr. Lodge speak. I didn’t need persuasion to keep doing what I was doing, but it was a pick‑me‑up to hear that I was exceeding his recommendations. From all that he had to say—and all that I’d heard elsewhere—about the benefits of exercise for managing arthritis pain, high blood pressure, lipid levels, bone loss, and other effects of aging, I suspected that he wouldn’t have tried to talk me into cutting back to four days a week, my tender age notwithstanding.

Today I joked to a friend that I exercise every day because I lack the discipline to take a day off. But I was only half-joking. The truth is, the last time I went a couple of days without exercise, I felt miserable, mopey, and disappointed in myself, and it took an unusual amount of effort to get my lazy butt back to the park the next day. For me, the rigid simplicity of the “Do something every day” rule is the source of its power.

I’m not trying to talk anyone else into exercising every day. It works for me because I get a psychological boost—and maybe a physical one as well—from the continuity and the sense of momentum. But I encourage everyone to devote time and attention to finding a routine that works for you. Challenge yourself. Try to figure out how much is too much. If you’re managing three days a week, experiment with taking it to four for a few weeks. Pay attention to how you feel, and keep notes about what works and what doesn’t.

And tell us what you’re up to in the comments section here!

If you can’t do everything, you can at least do something.

A few days ago, I mentioned the rules of the exercise game that I’ve been playing:

On Wednesday, someone who’s been reading this blog lately said to me, “I just can’t exercise every day.”

I replied, “I’m not saying that you should. It’s your life, and it’s your game. You make up the rules. Just make sure that it’s working toward the goals you want to accomplish, that it’s sufficiently challenging to keep you interested, and that it’s possible to win.”

Up until today, I haven’t felt the need to invoke Rule #2. I’ve put serious time and effort into the previous posts. But it’s been a busy, hectic week. I’ve worked long hours all week, and now I’m coming down to the deadline for Day 9.

So tonight, in the spirit of “Everything counts,” and in lieu of a more substantial message, I’m going to issue a challenge to you:

It’s your life; it’s your game. Design a game that you’re willing to play for a specified period of time. Make it about one or more aspects of your life that you’d like to enrich. Example: “Every day for the next two weeks, I will walk for 30 minutes, ride my bicycle, OR spend 10 minutes meditating.” Or it could be, “For each of the next 10 days, I will read at least five pages of something that’s just for fun, and I will eat more fruits and vegetables.”

Be clear on the rules. How much bike-riding counts? What do you mean by “more fruits and vegetables”? Write your rules down.

Tell me the rules of your game by leaving a comment at the bottom of this page. I’ll check back with you later to see how it’s going!

The first time I got serious about exercise, I became a member of the YMCA in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. The Y offered an incentive program for runners. They gave out 6 x 9 index cards on which you could record your miles by inking in a grid of 500 tiny boxes. When you filled the card, you turned it in with $5 and got a downtown ymca 500‑mile club T‑shirt.

Image: m_bartosch / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I filled up two cards, so I also got a 1,000‑mile club T‑shirt before I left Knoxville. I worked hard for those cheap T‑shirts. Even though the card program relied on the honor system, I scrupulously discounted fractional miles and pushed myself harder every time I neared the end of another row of boxes.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2004. I was walking semi-regularly at Memorial Park in Houston with my friend Scott. One day Scott said, “We should set a regular walking routine.” Up to that point in my life, I’d always considered myself allergic to routine—it seemed to me that putting anything enjoyable on a timetable was the surest way to drain the fun out of it. But I liked walking with Scott, so I agreed to a schedule. We would walk every weekday morning at 7:00, every weekend morning at 8:00.

We built a fail-safe into the system by agreeing to wait only briefly for the other person to arrive. After 10 minutes, we were to assume he wasn’t coming and commence the walk. And we added another rule to keep the game uncomplicated: if one of us didn’t show up, there was no need to explain, to apologize, or to call to find out if we were still on for tomorrow. We were always still on for tomorrow.

These few rules made the game surprisingly effective. By the end of 2004, I was routinely walking five or six days a week. Scott had other commitments that eventually broke up our walking partnership, but I kept going, at one point racking up 13 months without a day off.

I’d been telling myself for a long time that I had the kind of body that needs to exercise every day, but I’d never managed to find the commitment to do so until it became a challenging—but winnable—game. So here’s my message for today:

Whatever you’d like to improve about your life, try making it into a game. Challenge yourself to exercise every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and then write down what you did on a calendar, or enter it into an online journal, or an Excel spreadsheet, or on a homemade scorecard stuck to the refrigerator door. It’s your game. Make up your own rules. Then play it to win.

Remember, though, that the game must be challenging, or you’ll get bored. But as one of my favorite coaches, Mattison Grey, explains, it also has to be a game you can win, or you’ll get discouraged. Later, you can change the rules when you’re ready for a bigger challenge.

My own game is always evolving to include higher stakes, extra challenges, and new twists to keep it fun, but two basic rules have remained constant for the last five years or so. I’ll tell you more about these in some upcoming posts:

When I started sensing that I’d gone too far, I exited the freeway and drove in the general direction where I thought I might find the lake. But I wasn’t seeing any promising signs—“This way to White Rock Lake” would have been most welcome—so before long, I gave up and resorted to asking for directions. I called a friend back home, sent her to Google maps, told her where I was, and she steered me the rest of the way to the lake. Who needs a smart phone?

Once I’d reached the lake, it took no time at all to find a parking spot a dozen steps away from the paved trail. I had encountered some disagreement among the web sites I browsed, but the consensus on the circumference of White Rock Lake is about nine miles, which is too far for my feet to walk on pavement. So I decided to head in one direction for 50 minutes, then turn around and return to where I’d parked, which would give me a distance about equal to my usual 6½ miles.

The outing at White Rock Lake cleared away the cobwebs of the previous evening’s disappointing walk. The day was beautiful and warm, with a nice breeze and fluffy clouds occasionally blocking the sun. I passed lots of fisherfolk, ducks, and picnicking families, and I was passed by joggers and dozens of cyclists whizzing along the broad asphalt trail that winds all the way around the lake. When the 50 minutes was almost up, I decided to prolong the experience with some “communing with nature.” I chose an empty pier in the distance as my stopping point, and when I got there, I rested my feet and watched gulls fish. They’d hover a few feet above the water in the stiff breeze, scanning the waves, then plunge suddenly to the surface. Every once in a while, they’d use the wind to climb higher for a better view, then pick a new spot to fish. “They sow not, neither do they reap”…and it was wonderful to share their lake.

I hiked back to the car, a little sore from the extra distance, but contented and mildly sunburnt. Overnight a cold front blew in. Saturday morning was cold and rainy, and the evening brought a rare first-day-of-spring snow.

Nevertheless, as soon as I finished checking in, I dressed in walking attire and headed up the freeway to Bachman Lake. But walking on the lake turned out to be scarier than I’d hoped. The path wound through clear space around the lake and was reasonably well-lighted, so I wasn’t especially afraid for my personal safety. But the parking lot didn’t inspire confidence. A sign offered the reassurance of video surveillance, but as I got farther and farther away from my car, I kept thinking about how quickly someone could get break in and get away with my wallet. After 10 minutes of walking, I started imagining how I would feel if I had to report such an event. I double-timed it back to the car—which was intact—and headed back to my hotel. The risk of shame is a powerful motivator.

Glass-half-full moment: Bachman Lake is at the end of the runways of Love Field, so at least before I fled, I got to enjoy the dazzling sight and sound of two Southwest jets coming in for landings right over my head!

Back at the hotel, I stashed my valuables, then went out to wander the neighborhood. Dallas’s Market Center isn’t a nightlife-rich environment—mostly concrete, freeways, rushing traffic, and empty office buildings. I decided to grant myself “moral equivalency” exercise credits for the harrowing drive and the abortive attempt to walk around the lake. I walked for about half an hour, then called it a day.

Next up: The trail around White Rock Lake in sunshine and 70° weather—and the chance to make up for some of yesterday’s missed miles. (Sometimes moral equivalency credits expire overnight. Sometimes I make up the rules as I go along.)