Overcoming Your Fear to Take That First Step

The day I started my journey to lose weight, get my health back, and find happiness, my brother and I decided to start running.

It was a frightening prospect and one that I wasn't too keen on at first. No, it wasn't the potential for sore legs or the burning in the lungs that was turning me off of the idea; it was the fact that people might...see me. The idea that with ever step my 360-pound body took, my body would jiggle embarrassingly and people would point, laugh and ridicule.

But we did it anyway. We started slowly and we never looked back.

I was reminded of my early fears when I was running last Thursday at the Do Life Tour Buffalo stop. I had the honor to run next to a brand new runner named Nancy. She had been going for a little over ten weeks. When I asked her how her training had been going, she revealed that up until today, all her runs had been inside her home. I assumed she meant a treadmill. She did not.

Nancy had spent the past 12 weeks running laps through her house to get her mileage in. Bedroom to kitchen to dining room and back to bedroom. And she was doing it because she was, what she called, ashamed to run outside for fear that people would see her. It was the exact fear that I had encountered two and a half years prior.

But I had learned from my experience and I tried to convey the message to Nancy as she found her way to her first-ever 5K finish line in an impressive 49 minutes.

This fear of the outside--of people seeing us bettering our lives--it is certainly a real fear, but that doesn't mean it has merit.

Think about it... When was the last time you were driving around, happened to see someone out running and thought, "Wow... what a loser."? You didn't. It simply doesn't happen.

Nancy faced her fear and busted through it in a big way last Thursday and I consider myself lucky to have shared the road with her.

And she sets an excellent example. We have to figure out a way to grab life--to Do Life. It's necessary. And it's always, always worth it.

See you out there.