It’s hard to form a habit.

There’s some sort of life-hack-y rule of thumb that if you can force yourself to do something for two weeks or forty days or something that it will just become a habit and you won’t have to work at it any more.

Training for the Ironman this last year was a solid year of charts and schedules to make sure I did six days of workouts a week. By now, I should just leap out of bed every morning and wake up somewhere around the second mile of a run or bike. Instead, I leapt right back into staying up late and watching a lot of TV and then dragging myself out of bed at the last possible second to get to work. I’ve got a sore knee and I don’t think it’s a running injury or anything, just soreness from not enough sleep.

“You deserve some time off!” people say, in a well-meaning way. Yeah, but I like the shape I’m in and I want to maintain that. And it turns out I need a to-do list to do it. Time to schedule a race…