Grab your battered guitar, face the dark and run…
(“Gene Kelly” – Felix Hagan & The Family, 2017)
Sam and John started the first PeakStreak 2018 with a small clip in the Facebook group. PeakStreak basically is about doing some activity consistently for every day this month. Walk for 15 minutes. Row for 500 meters. Anything. I think it‘s also supposed to increase in distance / reps over the four weeks?
I honestly felt hesitant about joining in with a physical activity for the PeakStreak. Just a few days ago I picked up my MPC 2017 workout routine again after almost eight (yes!) lazy weeks. It was hard and I‘m already not as consistent as I had wanted to be. But after quite a lot of postponing / switching / skipping workout days in the past year I’ve finally learned, that all of this is ok, as long as I keep up some consistency. I learned to accept that it’s ok to take two active rest days instead of just one or an additional rest day if that fits better into my schedule of just… life! As long as I don‘t start slacking and stop exercising for two months. (Again). The first few workouts after such a long break left me quite sore and that‘s an experience I‘d like to avoid in the future. Thus my plan for January is to keep up a sort of regular workout routine without being too hard on myself for additional days off. Besides any real „workout“ I‘m usually rather active (walk for 4-6 km) each day anyway, so I wasn’t sure I’d want to commit to another physical activity on top of that.
I started thinking about what would be an actual challenge for January? Probably the one non-physical activity I had set up as one of my five challenges for MPC2017 and failed at so utterly. Writing! Ok, the „challenge“ had actually been „to finally start writing that novel“ and in my first MPC2017 blog post over a year ago I had even laid out my plan, inspired by having just read Lauren Graham‘s “Talking as fast as you can”. Aim for a certain amount of time (or in my case words) to write each day. Either on that novel, a journal, or other stuff. This blog post for instance. Have a document open for each part and just write. Don‘t open any other page. Don‘t go online. [It does help that my internet is not working at home right now. I‘m using Flash drive, office email, free open WiFi at the city centre and my phone to actually post this today. But I degress.] Anyway, that method had been the plan, but it also had been so very very vague. And I never really started writing anything novel like. I‘m a bit ashamed to admit that to be honest. I thought about the story I wanted to write, but that‘s all it ever amounted to: Thoughts on my mind. Often enough even only fragments of thoughts. A lot „you should/could do this or that“ thoughts too. But never actually doing anything about it.
Without trying to overanalyze this all, I‘m pretty sure I‘m just so very afraid of failure in any creative outlet. Well, in a lot of other aspects of my (professional) life as well. But especially creatively. When you think about it, that‘s such stupid fear or even thought. First of all: What constitutes failure anyway? And who determines it? And how can I fail if I don‘t even begin to create anything? I know that‘s actually such a no-brainer. There are probably dozens of inspiring fridge magnets stating something like that, right?
So here is my PeakStreak challenge: Write 1000 words each day. Novel. Journal. Blog. Whatever.
Wish me luck. And persistence.
Added after week 01: 1.000 words is hard. When you’ve not slept well and/or are back from a busy day at work and just feel exhausted. I was very much tempted to quit after this weekend. I didn’t write anything on Thursday and had vowed to make up with 2.000 words on Friday. I wrote 800 of those in the morning and in the afternoon some weird fever knocked me down for 40 hours and I didn’t write anything on Friday or Saturday. I did write a bit over 1.000 words yesterday; either journalling or blogging or drafting a blog post. But it was hard and even though I would love to not quit this challenge after a week, I know that I can’t keep up with that goal of 1.000 words each day. So I decided to amend it to 1.000 seconds = ca. 17 minutes in week 01 (probably wrote for that period of time actually), 1.500 seconds = 25 minutes in week 02…