Funny thing happened today…I set out to the gym on my lunch break to tackle a 5 mile hill workout and from the first step I knew it wasn’t happening.

new carpet in the ladies’ locker room!

My legs felt like lead and I felt like the treadmill was lying to me as an 11 minute mile pace felt so hard to maintain. I was SO mad at myself! I wanted to just go back down to the locker room, change and head back to work. But I decided that I’d at least try running with minimal incline (.5) so that I could get the miles in. I am not lying when I tell you that I literally looked down at the “distance completed” screen so many times that I don’t think I ever went so far as a tenth of a mile without a glance.

3 boring miles. The trend lately seems to be my love of my training is on the decline (mental note: TAKE A BREAK!). When I finished the 3 miles I decided to walk slowly to cool down and check my phone for some distraction. That’s when I saw this on Twitter and just had to reply.

It completely changed my view of the failure. So much so that I turned that walk into a slightly faster walk….and then I raised the incline up to 8 and continued to walk….and then??? I started to RUN at that incline. I covered about a half mile of hill intervals!!!!

I ended up with 4.5 miles total (instead of the scheduled 5) and of course only half a mile of hill running, but that’s better than nothing, and better than just 3 flat miles. I was drenched by the time I finished. But better than that, my negative view of the workout came full circle and I walked out of the gym with a smile on my face. I came back to the office to feast on my healthy lunch.

pop chips, salad, egg, avocado and grapefruit

So that’s how you take a failure to succeed and turn it into a successful failure! 

Question: Have you ever not wanted to work out and gone anyway only to leave with a smile on your face?

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