Why I’m Accepting Mark Zuckerberg’s Fitness Challenge

So I’m skimming my social media feeds this morning and come across the news that Mark Zuckerberg has invited all his Facebook friends to join him in the challenge to run 365 miles this year. In other words, a mile a day. (This being a leap year, I guess everyone takes February 29 off.) I scoffed. I ran my fourth half-marathon in November; my last run, on Sunday, was eight miles long. At first blush, Zuckerberg’s challenge didn’t seem like much of a challenge at all.

But then I got to thinking. The hardest part about exercise is, you know, doing it. Just waking up and putting on your workout gear and motivating to jam to the gym or press play on your Ballet Beautiful video or whatever. And the hardest part of running, for me, is that first mile—the transition from the idea, appealing in theory, of going for a run to the reality of running itself. The first mile is a crucible. The more I thought about Zuckerberg’s challenge, the more I appreciated that I’ve still got an iffy relationship with exercise. Most days, I’ve got the self-discipline to lace up my Nikes and get on the road or hustle to some class or other, but there are many occasions when that discipline flags, when it seems so much pleasanter to sleep an extra hour or watch one more episode of Making a Murderer instead.

What I’d really like is for exercise to require no self-discipline at all—for it to be as natural as brushing my teeth or putting on the coffee, part of the morning ritual. An easy one-mile run might not replace the heart-pumping benefits of a 30-minute-plus jog, but for the sedentary, it’s better than nothing—and for me, long runs aside, it’s a daily habit I’d like to get into. From the runner’s perspective, spending a few months in that habit would break me of my first-mile fear—and make my regular five- and eight-milers easier to face.

Long story short: Zuckerberg, you’re on.

The post Why I’m Accepting Mark Zuckerberg’s Fitness Challenge appeared first on Vogue.