Intangible motivation

Sometimes we get up and we know we need to exercise, there's every logical reason to exercise: we want to lose weight, so we need to make a deficit and keep our metabolism up; it's the day we're scheduled to exercise; we feel better and better about ourselves when we get up and get it done. Rationally, we want to go run. But emotionally, we don't feel like it. We feel tired and kinda depressed in that way that has no particular reason and while we'll take that cup of coffee, after that we'd really prefer to smoke a bunch of weed, eat ice cream for breakfast, and put off exercise by studying. (I don't really mean this to be a "royal we", it's really more like the French pronoun on except using "one" in English sounds weirdly formal.) Yet sometimes we go ahead, eat a banana with the coffee, change into our running clothes and go out anyway - and sometimes we stay in, smoke, eat breakfast, though not ice cream, and wait for a moment when cardio seems more important than the molecular geometry of acetonitrile. What makes the difference? What is the arbiter between the "two wills", as Augustine would put it? Maybe it was the fact that the weather looked nice, and when the weather is nice at 7:30 AM it's usually not so nice by the afternoon. Or that I've got a cute new athletic top to wear, even though it was still cold enough to wear a sweatshirt over it.

Sometimes, after you've sucked it up and trotted your butt out the door, the world seems to want to test your commitment. Like, you start to get a pain in your leg and it's as if someone wants to know your ability to tell a good reason to stop from a minor obstacle requiring patient persistence from a bullshit excuse. Because later on, after you've shaken it out a little and decided to at least jog to the 1.4-mile turnaround, and then felt okay and kept going to the 2.0-mile turnaround, you feel really just fine and of course you could go the third mile, but if you do, you'll probably miss your boyfriend's radio show that you usually can't listen to because you have class. So you turn around feel strange that you pushed past biological dampers, but ended up cutting short due to a reason that would have seemed a lame excuse if you hadn't really wanted to go further.

Ultimately, I'm glad I only went 2.0 miles. I got to listen to the radio show and my leg started to complain again just as I was getting back, so I might have had to stop and walk if I'd gone for 3. Which would have been much more trouble than anything that did happen.