Overcoming Your Mental Barriers with Running

At Vision, we love to supplement your body composition goals with a tangible goal to test your physical capabilities. Essentially, we want to give you a little extra motivation to stick to your cardio goals each week in an extremely satisfying way for yourself. This often ends up with clients who never signed up to run, running a distance they previously thought impossible. This is always exciting for the trainers because we get to see an amazing transformation with your health and fitness and it helps to shift focus from body composition.

There are some extremely common barriers to entry with running your first 5 or 10km run. Time and time again, we ask the question, “there’s an event coming up in a few months, are you interested in running a 5km with me?” and it’s nearly always responded with, “I can’t do that.”. If you’re not currently running, and you're reading this and think that sounds like you, at least you know you’re not alone. Every single person who runs or wants to run has to mentally overcome this. Fortunately for you when running, everyone is in your corner.

Everyone loves an underdog story. Whether it’s Rocky Balboa, the Mighty Ducks, the Jamaican bobsled team, time and time again we root for the underdog. Sometimes you see a bit of yourself in the underdog and that’s why you root for them, but what they do best is that they get us to believe and there is nothing more powerful than that. They make experienced runners and non-runners believe.

For experienced runners, it reminds them of where they’ve come from and that nervous excitement of really pushing your limits and there’s something really humble about that. For non-runners it removes a layer of the barrier to entry having watched you grow and develop your fitness.

“What if people think I look funny/weird?”

Dr Seuss put it perfectly with “Those who mind, don’t matter and those who matter, don’t mind”. We all want to believe in the underdog.

If you want to be a runner, you can be. All you have to do is run and you are a runner. Take it one step at a time and push a little further each week. You might go for a walk and choose to run to the end of the street. Slowly but surely, 10 metres becomes 100 metres, which becomes 1 kilometre and all of a sudden, you’ve mastered your own running journey.

Ask your trainer for help with how to start or come to our weekly Run Club. You will always feel right at home and everyone is going to support your journey.