Crucial Tactic: Tell Your Excuses to Fuck Off
Tucson, Arizona. Photo: Marcel Slootheer
No matter how many excuses I put to rest, no matter how many articles I write presenting solutions to problems like lack of time, lack of physical fitness, lack of access to the outdoors, etc., the reality is that someone will always come up with a new reason why they can't do Outside 365. I can guarantee you that you can come up with an excuse for why your personal situation is different, and why you couldn't possibly go outside and be active every single day.
This leads us to the mac daddy of all the crucial tactics you can employ to accomplish Outside 365. If you can get this one right, if you can embody this with your entire soul, then nothing will stop you.
All you need to do is tell your excuses to fuck right off.
I don't really give a flying fuck what excuse you come up with for not getting your Outside 365 goal done. If you've decided that this is one of your most important life values, and then you live in such a way that your life doesn't align with your own stated values, none of your excuses fucking matter.
Confession time: in the early days of Outside 365, before I'd gotten my first year in, I would employ excuses all the damn time. I'd be too tired from my workout the day before. My schedule that day was just too packed to fit it in. The weather was too cold. The rain was too hard. The road was too muddy. On and on the excuses went.
But instead of caving to every excuse, I began to examine them more critically. "Is this actually true?" I would ask myself. "Am I really too sore? Am I really too tired? Do I really not have enough time?"
As I questioned my excuses, the answers came back as, "no, you could push through the soreness and the tiredness to do one mile. You can easily make 20 minutes to walk a mile today."
Or in other words, I told my excuses to go fuck themselves. I began going outside and getting my goal done, whether or not every goddamned excuse on the planet would arise in my brain. I had already failed and caved to my excuses multiple times in the past (usually due to injuries). But eventually, I had enough. I wasn't about to fucking give up this time around. I was going to fucking do it.
And now, despite dealing with additional injuries and all the makings of the perfect excuse to quit, I haven't given up. I've accomplished my goal each and every day for the past 1,167 days.
The one caveat... or is it?
There's only one potential caveat that I can come up with, only one potential excuse that I can entertain. It is possible that moving your body through nature and accomplishing Outside 365 might be one of your prime values in life, but you might not be physically able to complete the challenge due to injury or illness.
Since I started this blog, I've had multiple people email me and share their dramatic physical challenges, such as major physical trauma and injury, surgeries, and battles against cancer. While I've dealt with my own serious injuries and surgeries over the years, I've never had cancer, and I can't even begin to imagine what that feels like.
Yet even for those people dealing with monumental challenges, I want to push back just a little bit and encourage you to ask yourself if you truly "can't" walk one mile per day... or if you just aren't willing to try.
A few years ago, I listened to a fascinating podcast interview with a female runner in her 50s or 60s who had a multi-decade running streak currently in progress. She had run at least 3 miles per day through some of life's most challenging moments. The one anecdote that lodged in my memory was about how she kept running through chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer. Even during the deepest and darkest days of her treatment, she would have her doctors tape the chemo pump to her chest so that it wouldn't move, and then she would get up out of her hospital bed, put on her running clothes, walk outside, and go running.
Every. Single. Day.
After listening to that story, I was forced to reexamine the excuses I've personally made based on physical injuries. Perhaps telling myself that I "couldn't" wasn't actually true. Maybe I could cover a mile per day. Maybe I should have just hardened the fuck up and gotten it done anyway.
I realized a couple of months after my second knee surgery that there was a way I could have kept moving one mile per day, if I really wanted to. While crutching a mile per day is pretty damn difficult (albeit possible), I could have purchased a wheelchair and pushed myself up and down the road a half-mile each way, which wouldn't even require the use of my leg. I ran an Amazon search and found that I could have a wheelchair shipped to my house in two days for less than a hundred dollars.
This is now my backup plan for the next time I have orthopedic surgery on one of my legs. It's going to happen eventually... the only question is "when."
But the next time that excuse comes up, I'm ready to tell it to fuck off.
Even More Crucial Tactics
Check out the other installments in the Crucial Tactics series here:
