Your Morning Routine Toolkit150where the gym is located), try committing to laying out your
workout clothes for a full week, putting one on each morning,
and doing one plank for a minute. Get in the habit of working
out before taking on a huge commitment to something you’ve
never even done before.
But will these tiny habits actually get you anywhere?
When I was pregnant with my son Jackson, I decided I
wanted to run a half marathon in the next year. Now, I’d never
run in anything that ended with “thon.” I’d never even run
more than a single- digit distance, and being about nine months
pregnant, I certainly hadn’t run in quite a while.
It was a rather ridiculous goal. Pregnancy, newborns, and
training for long- distance races don’t mesh. But I knew it was
something I wanted to do. I decided right there in my living
room to start training. And I did that by getting up to get my
own ice cream instead of pulling the pregnant- wife card and
asking my husband to get it for me.
That’s right: my training for a race titled “the hardest half
in Texas” started with ice cream.
It sounds silly, but I made a series of choices and took small
steps toward my goal. In his 1913 autobiography, Theodore
Roosevelt shared a powerful quote from William Meek “Squire
Bill” Widener: “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where
you are.”^7
Eventually, I upgraded from a walk to the fridge to walk-
ing around the block. My first post- birth run was ugly. I’m
pretty sure things were moving that weren’t supposed to move.
I made it about a hundred yards.
The days that followed were filled with gains and losses,
but I kept on. On my son’s first birthday I ran a super hilly 13.1