I’ll figure out who that makes me later

It's Friday morning, and my very special lady friend comes downstairs, gets ready to head out the door, gives me a kiss, and wishes me a good morning. That’s the prompt.

It's time for me to go work on runnerslean.com. I grab my coffee, head to my home office, fire up the computer, and I'm tempted to start productively procrastinating, working on day job projects or drafting the next newsletter.

The resistance was strong, but I asked, "What's one thing I can do in the next 20 minutes to add value to the site?" I opened Claude and typed in, "Let's do some research on back muscle fatigue in older ultrarunners...”

I skimmed through the articles and ideas. At the end of 20 minutes, I wrote down, “On Monday, start by reading Low Back Pain in Distance Runners on Physiopedia.”

Yabba-dabba-doo! It wasn’t a new post, but it was progress.

The habit of working on the site twice a week is still taking shape. It hasn't rooted yet. Working through the exercises in Fogg's Tiny Habits the last month has helped me examine many of my behaviors.

Temptation to skip another habit arose the next day when I planned a long run after a morning of shrub and tree removal. I was hungry, dirty, sweaty, and exhausted.

I anticipated there would be resistance to running in the afternoon heat, so after my shower I put on my running clothes before lying down for a quick nap. I know how to overcome that resistance because I’m a runner.

I wasn’t athletic as a kid, and I started running in my mid-30s. At first, I didn't see myself as a runner, but as the miles added up and I talked to other people, it became clear that I was a runner.

Once I started entering ultra-marathons, friends started to call me an athlete. That was an identity I had a tough time accepting, but when I started working with coaches and adding strength training to my schedule, being an athlete was an identity I became more comfortable with.

I didn’t know it at the time, but some of the resistance around building out the Runner’s Lean site was my uneasiness with embracing a new identity, which is a skill in the last step of Fogg’s Behavior Design model. I had excused the lack of progress on the site with standards like “I got busy” and “It was a low priority.” But showing up required me to claim an identity I hadn’t yet earned.

I’m naturally a dreamer and a planner. Once the easy steps of registering the URL, framing up the site, and sharing my story were done, I felt uncomfortable taking it further. “Who am I to tell other runners how their hips should move?”

For most of my life, I’ve started with the end in mind. Set a goal, identify the necessary habits, march toward it. It’s served me well.

But I don’t know the end for Runner’s Lean. I don’t know if it’s a few blog posts sharing stories or a comprehensive list of causes and solutions. That not-knowing kept me from showing up. I couldn’t picture the destination, so I couldn’t picture the person who’d built it.

Fogg’s method runs the other way. You don’t begin with the identity. You begin with the behavior, tiny and repeatable, and let the identity emerge. To uncover that identity, Fogg suggests finishing the sentence, “I’m the kind of person who___.”

I'm the kind of person who struggles with Runner’s Lean, and I'm certainly aging. I’m also the kind of person who pursues getting incrementally better.

I’ll keep working on the site two mornings a week and figure out who that makes me later.