The Third Step

People who tell you the first step of any journey is the hardest probably haven't actually achieved anything.

The first step is great - it feels like decisiveness, control over your own destiny, bold, positive action against a sea of whatever troubles you think are dogging you where you stand. So's the second step, to be fair - that's when you get that slight 'Look at me, I'm actually doing this' smugness.

Step three - or lap three, or circuit three - that's when you have to shake your head a little to clear it of the new reality that settles on you like malicious snow. Really? We're doing this now? At which point what you absolutely mustn't ever do is take a long view of the horizon, because the horizon, or the finishing line, or the moment of completion and success is so astonishingly far away, still, that it will aactively demotivate you.

Step three, or lap three, or circuit three, is not by any stretch where things get hard. Not even slightly. But it's the step at which, if you like, and changing metaphors completely, you've jumped off the high board, and you get that sense of questioning whether, all things considered, that was the best move you could have made.

Whether it is or it isn't, of course, there's precisely nothing to be done about it at that point but head ultimately onward, and downward, and try not to break anything too important when you get there.

Day three is always a little tricky because it's when things start to call to you. Comforts, or in my case, carbs, sweet things, all the lines and lines of unwisdom that can keep me bound in this body and ultimately kill me ahead of all the other contenders that fancy a crack at the gig. It's simply the body reacting to a change of circumstance of course, a body that's been used to living one way, and has let you have your fun for three days, but now really would prefer the old life back, thankyouverymuch - the lazy life, the sweet life, the reach out and grab it, say "fuck it all" life.

I've been down this road enough times now to stick my fingers in my ears and sing "lalalalala."
Day four is always better. You get the horrendously premature sense of trophyism, the "Look what I've done" sense of having beaten day three. It's more than a little pathetic of course, but it works like anaesthetic to make the next few days easier. You amass your three pathetic little days and they become the beginning of something, and you don't want to spoil them. You begin to weigh three days against whatever it is that's calling to you, on that whole "one day at a time" principle, and you begin to think you're going to win.

So, having just done my day three biking, let's be having day four along quick smart, if you please.