On Achieving Goals By Ignoring Them

How the effects of one ultramarathoner's brain surgery taught me a useful lesson about exercise.

One of my favorite things to do for quick getaways is to visit local bed & breakfasts. There are quite a lot of them within a 3-hour drive of my house, and my husband and I hate to waste precious vacation time on travel. For New Year’s Eve, we stayed at the absolutely incredible Inn Boonsboro, which is owned by the grand dame of romance, Nora Roberts. I went for a romantic getaway, but ended up leaving with really useful exercise advice.

I don’t normally write about my New Year’s resolutions; there’s a bit of superstition involved, but mostly I just don’t normally place a lot of stock in choosing January 1 to start a new habit. I prefer to bias towards action; if I decide I want to start making progress toward a goal, I do it then. “Never believe you’ll be a different person tomorrow” has always struck me as fundamentally good advice.

But this year it just so happened that I had an epiphany about what I need to do to “get my body back” on New Year’s Day. The timing was good — almost immediately after my daughter was finally beginning to become independent. The stars aligned for a fitness goal, and I’m happy to report that the first month is going well.

More importantly, I’m hoping that reporting why it’s going well might help someone.

Habits are Hard

In my June 2022 article about why daily notes don’t work as well for me as themed logs, I explained that I have a really hard time with habits, and lamented not having a good exercise habit or breakfast habit.

I've tried off and on for years to establish a "mindless exercise habit," a habit of eating a "nice" breakfast, a habit of remembering to take my vitamins, a habit of waking up early, a habit of doing spaced repetition of my notes with Readwise... you name it, I've tried it, and it hasn't really worked out.

I eat nice breakfasts sometimes, of course, but sometimes I slam down a hard-boiled egg and a banana and call it a day. I generally take my vitamins if I see the little container they're in. I mostly exercise, in some form or another, as long as I'm not sick. But it's not consistent.

I’m happy to report that I seem to have, at least for now, cracked the breakfast goal… thanks to my kids. I’ve always been good at maintaining structure for the sake of the children and now that I’ve been sleeping better at night I’ve implemented a system to cut down on the amount of slapped together cereal the family eats. It feels like one I will be able to stick to for a long, long time.

There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about it; there are thousands of mommy bloggers and parenting advice authors out there who are happy to advocate meal rotations and meal planning and structure and all that. My family’s new system of waffles on Tuesday followed by French toast on Wednesday and egg sandwiches on Thursday isn’t going to blow anybody’s mind. And anyway, different families will have different schedules, different food preferences, different amounts of kitchen space.

But the important takeaway for me was that by making it so obvious that Tuesday morning means waffles, that my son expects waffles, that my butt needs to be out of bed in time to make waffles — I could make a nice breakfast actually happen as easily as “showing up to work on time” and “remembering to check my email.” It’s a non-optional duty. It’s not mindless, but it’s going to happen.

I can buy the protein mix to make myself feel better about the health benefits of waffles, I can fancy it up with homemade whipped cream to keep the sugar down, I can toss in some blueberries if I’m up for it — and I can skip all that if I’m not. But fundamentally, Tuesday means waffles… as firmly as any other recurring obligation.

That’s always been the key for me: someone else depending on me. Eating healthy, staying fit for my own sake? Very hard! Ensuring my family eats well? Much easier.

And family is at the heart of my fitness goals now, too — because I’m not trying to lose ten pounds or an inch off my waistline or even climb a mountain for my own sake. My goal is to be healthy enough to help my kids if they have kids, to keep exploring charming little towns with my husband if we’re able to retire together, to make sure that my hips and back don’t hurt so badly at the end of the day that my husband is stuck holding the bag on childcare and dinner and dishes and everything else.

It’s still hard; I don’t really have what I would call an exercise habit. I don’t like exercise, never have¹, not unless it’s incidental to something social I’m already doing. I’m happy to hang out at the gym with a friend on a treadmill or lifting weights if they need me. But just to… go? There’s always something else I could be doing that helps people immediately. And leaving the house is always hard for me — if I can avoid it, I do.

I could be answering work emails, I could be unloading the dishwasher, I could be writing a book review. Whenever I exercise alone, I spend all the time I’m ‘supposed’ to be counting reps or cycling for 30 minutes or monitoring my heartbeat or whatever thinking about what else I could be doing in that moment.

Lessons From Ultra Marathoners

But Boonsboro helped, because in Boonsboro I met an ultra marathoner who enjoyed long runs along the Appalachian trail. She mostly chatted with my husband, as he’s much more knowledgeable about running and hiking than I am. But afterward, my husband was inspired to share with me a related story… that kind of blew my mind. Turns out the world’s most interesting (to me, at least) ultramarathoner used to be a tennis player, until she developed seizures. Diane Van Deren picked up running to try to help control them, and ended up getting a lobectomy which, among other things, messed with her sense of time. Here’s an excerpt from the transcript of the radio show my husband shared with me on the car ride home.

MARK: After a year or so of no seizures, Diane decided to enter this race, a 50-miler, on a whim. … Diane finds these sort of workarounds for what she lost in the surgery, but the fact is she only became this amazing runner after the surgery.

DIANE: I think having a brain injury puts me at a disadvantage. But I think for me, the one advantage, if I had to say I have an advantage over the other athletes, would be time. Time - I can really get lost in time.

MARK: Think about it. If you don't know where you are in time, you don't know how much further you have to go, how far you've been. You're just running. You just hearing your footsteps, and that's it.

Getting lost in time is very very hard for me. My brain is always on, I’m always thinking about what’s happened and what’s next. Historically, when I exercised, I always kept very aware of how far I’d gone, how many reps I’d done, what my next stretch was going to be, how much time I’d been on the treadmill, how long until the yoga class was over, etc. I’m not much for TV shows and music doesn’t really distract me. Now that I have kids, working out after work with a friend isn’t really viable.

Most of my friends who have success with losing weight or gaining muscle or whatever are the sorts of people who carefully track their progress. Spreadsheets, apps, all that. I’m a big fan of lists, so I’ve often approached workouts as a box to check. Then I stopped checking those boxes in favor of checking boxes that mattered to other people.

But Diane’s story made me think: what if the key to consistently exercising was completely shifting my attention away from the exercise itself?

This realization reshaped my approach. Instead of concentrating on reps or minutes, I found a way to make exercise feel less like a chore and more like an integrated part of my day.

I bought a cheap desk treadmill for my standing desk and started walking during my meetings. Not only does this maximize my time, but it also reframes exercise as a background activity rather than the main event. In nice weather it’s very easy for me to walk a couple of miles to the grocery store in the morning with my daughter because it’s getting her out of the house and running a useful errand for the family. But in winter it was harder, and the treadmill helps.

On days with no meetings, I started finding a documentary that genuinely captures my interest and watching it while on the treadmill. Not a TV show where I either don’t really care or want to watch the next episode right away. A youtube video like this really interesting guy talking about the Battle of Agincourt, which I knew almost nothing about.

The nice thing is that once the video is over, I can reward myself by writing down what I learned. It’s pretty quick to check any specific details I might want, thanks to an AI-enhanced transcript and a handy AI integration². The process makes me feel more like I am learning than exercising. I’ve always liked to learn, and telling myself that it’s ok if I stop “being productive” so that I can exercise (but really learn about something interesting) seems to be working.

For the most part. I still have days where I’m so tired I take two naps. Days where my elbows hurt so bad I regret ever picking up a dumbbell. Some days my hips hurt so bad I end up limping out of the gym, like the first time I tied tradmill time to my son’s swim practice. I’m pretty sure my postpartum osteitis pubis is due to hypermobility, which has made me to rethink my approach to weightlifting. A friend recommended focusing on fewer reps with heavier weights, which seems to be helping minimize the strain.

Lessons Left to Learn

I still have a lot of ways to get better at taking care of myself (I need to stop slouching over my keyboard, for one!), but If I’ve learned anything this month, it’s that the key to achieving a goal isn’t necessarily willpower—it’s strategy³. By removing barriers, creating structure, and focusing on sustainability, I’ve managed to maintain momentum. Most importantly, I’ve discovered the value of reframing exercise not as a task to endure but as a thing to ignore ;)

Everyone’s different, of course. Some people get a lot out of spreadsheets and charts—they love tracking every run and watching the numbers go up. Some people just genuinely love running and need some kind of exercise to feel good in their own skins. And then there are people like me who hate exercise but can make it work by tying it to something fun or rewarding.

As with achieving any goal, try different stuff, don’t overthink it, and don’t let anyone convince you there’s only one way to succeed. Hope your January is going as well as (or better than!) mine.

1. It reminds me of the gut microbiome study where researchers moved poop from active mice into lazy ones, and the lazy mice started running more. Clearly, I don’t have that kind of gut microbiome.

2. I watch videos in Readwise Reader and use the Ghostreader AI to clean up the transcript, highlight important bits, and check things I forgot a detail about. Note: I work for Readwise, and one of the ways I convince myself that this is “productive” instead of “being selfish by exercising” or whatever nonsense my brain likes to serve up is that it is quite literally my job to catch problems with features like this, which means I have to actually use them sometimes.

3. For my take on strategy in a totally different sense, check out my reviews of Certain to Win by Chet Richards. Here’s Part I: Big Picture and Part II: Business.