Crucial Tactic: Start Small
Crested Butte, Colorado
Building on my recent article about "The Most Crucial Tactic," I'm beginning a series of articles that will share other crucial tactics for tackling the concrete goal of getting outside and covering one human-powered mile per day, every day, for 365 days straight. While the most crucial tactic will get you a long ways, there are plenty of other tactics and strategies that you can add to your toolbox, ready to deploy at a moment's notice.
At the risk of repeating myself, I can't begin without acknowledging that the next most crucial tactic is to "start small."
As I've written before, for many people reading this who may not be athletes (currently) but are drawn to the idea of physically reconnecting with nature every day, the idea of riding a bike for an hour or running a mile may be overwhelming. It may seem physically impossible at this point. It might actually be physically impossible for you to run a mile every day, much less climb a mountain. Don't let that reality get you down, but simply acknowledge your current reality accurately, but without any shame or blame attached to it.
To just such a person, I have this to say: just go for a walk. Walking is enough, and it can even change your life.
Too often, we make our goals so much more difficult than they have to be... and when we do that, we often crash and burn before we've even gotten started. The more complex a challenge, the more likely it is that we'll feel the burden of overwhelm and buckle under the pressure.
If, for example, you set the goal of going on an hour-long hike on a singletrack trail deep in the forest every single day, that might sound great on paper... but when push comes to shove, you're probably going to fail to meet that goal before the first month is out.
You Can Always Make the Goal More Difficult Later
It's always easier to make a goal more complex, more nuanced, or more difficult as you go. But to get to a difficult goal, you need to start somewhere easier.
Choosing to start small, with just one mile a day, will prove to be the springboard that you can build all of the rest of the Outside 365 challenge upon. Or maybe you don't even start at one mile per day—maybe you start with less. Maybe it's just 10 minutes. I started off with no mileage goal—the only requirement was that I move my body outside every single day.
After you've proven to yourself that you can meet that minimum bar, such as walking a mile per day, every day, for a month or two in a row, you will then develop the confidence to say, "Hey, maybe I can hike a few more miles on some of these days. Or maybe I can try another activity, like riding a bicycle, going snowshoeing, or maybe going skiing."
Accomplishing basic goals helps create the confidence required to tackle more challenging goals later on. But it's ultra-important to build the base-level confidence first, because then in your heart of hearts, you'll know that you can continue to push yourself, continue to level up. You won't have to wonder anymore, as you'll be able to feel the confidence that you've built in yourself.
Starting small might not feel exciting in the moment, but I guarantee you that these small steps, these incremental gains, will aggregate and compound upon each other, eventually leading to absolutely massive changes in your life!
Even More Crucial Tactics
Check out the other installments in the Crucial Tactics series here:
