Ladies and gentlemen – I just registered for my very first 5k!! Woohoo!! Hooray! Nothing has ever been so exciting! Best! Day! Ever!

Not convinced?

Bear with me. I’m doing my best to convince myself that training to run a 5k is something that I am in any way excited about.

I’m not the girl who loves to run, or the girl who craves competition. Who I am is the girl who needs goals. Badly.

Whenever I had a particularly rough day chasing THE BIG GOAL to lose 100 lbs, I would imagine the Before & After pictures. I could force myself to work out even on the laziest day by imagining a sports-bra-in-front-of-people After Picture.

I’m not gonna lie, putting together Before & After images is great fun.

What’s that? You want to see another one? Well… if you insist:

Yup. That’s fun.

But now I need something new to force a workout on a lazy day. I need a goal with a deadline.

One thing I’ve long known about myself is this: If I don’t have a deadline to meet, I will do precisely nothing.

I respond well to deadlines. Deadlines and goals help me to frame my life.

I spent so long in pursuit of my 100 pound weight loss. Now that that goal has been met I scarcely know what to do with myself.

Enter: 5k. Craziness.

It had to be done. I had to move the goalpost on myself.

While running a 5k may not be as exciting as a Before & After picture, failing to set new goals could mean falling into the ‘diet’ trap. When I’ve yo-yoed in the past, it was because I reached a goal and called it a day.

Unfortunately, when you choose a fit lifestyle, you’re not allowed to call it a day. You have to keep going forever.

Rude.

If you’re the kind of person who can go to the gym every day without any specific goals in mind, you’ve got your ish together better than I do.

As for me, I need to be consistently mindful of future goals. Up next: Sprint Triathlon? Maybe.

Who knows how far those goalposts can go! I hope to live an Eleanor Roosevelt kind of life.

“ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”