Since I started commuting to the Heping Street campus via Dongzhimen, I began riding a bike because I was getting up too late and the bus was always stuck in traffic.
At first, I rode shared bikes, but I always felt the pedals lacked power, so I couldn’t ride fast.
Later, I got a second-hand geared bike and gradually shifted to higher gears. Hmm, it became exciting, very energetic!
Of course, I don’t ride every day — I skip days when it rains, snows, or it’s too cold or hot. The record is roughly as follows:
For a long time, I thought this was a very ordinary thing. Later, I realized that unconsciously, I had developed a habit of exercising for more than 40 minutes every day. The intensity is not high, but every day I give some stimulus to my heart and thighs.
I thought of a mention in the book The Power of Habit that when people regard house cleaning as a chore, they dislike it and find it hard to form a habit. But when they treat it as 20 minutes of daily exercise, they feel it is self-improvement and thus dislike it less.
If I only considered cycling as commuting, I probably would dislike it and just want to minimize the time spent. But when I treat cycling as exercise, and even in recent days as a way to relax (listening to music and thinking of nothing while riding), I have persisted so long and maintained lower limb strength.
Following the same theory, recently I’ve started trying to do a few push-ups when I’m tired at work, treating it as relaxation rather than exercise — when I train to improve upper body strength for exercise’s sake, I can’t persist for many days because my goal is high. But if I don’t care about how many push-ups I do daily, just do them slowly and rest when tired, I persist. Because the process feels comfortable (most exercises at an appropriate intensity make people feel comfortable rather than fatigued).
Another example is that just two months ago, I hated running — every lap around the track (about 400 meters) left me exhausted. Now when I run, I think of nothing — I don’t run to train my cardio or adjust my mood, I just run when my body feels stiff from working too long. If I feel like running, I run; if I get tired, I stop. As a result, I can now run 2,000 meters continuously.
Amazing, isn’t it? Changing your perspective can completely turn your attitude around.
Back to today’s title—what changes has this medical student experienced after a thousand days of consistent cycling?
Actually, nothing much happened. I didn’t increase my exercise volume every day like the leader Lee. My exercise load reached its limit a long time ago because the road conditions don’t allow me to shift to more strenuous gears, and the distance is not long enough, about 5 kilometers. My legs don’t even start to get sore before it’s over.
But something did happen: I persisted unconsciously in an exercise habit and discovered a small trick to maintaining a good habit:
Don’t hold onto any goals, just enjoy it.