The Book I Wish I’d Read When I Was 20

Hello and welcome to my first article on this new Find Time for Exercise blog.

Well, the book is written, the printing process is about to start, and the publication date is 7 weeks away on August 28th. It’s been a long and winding road to get this far, given that I started writing it in October 2016 and started telling people about it a couple of months later. Maybe I should have kept quiet for a bit longer and avoided putting that level of unnecessary pressure onto myself. Maybe. Who knows?

Anyway, the task of writing a book and getting it to publication has been an interesting one and I’ve learned a lot from it, so I am pleased that I set out to do it and look forward to being more efficient when I come to write another. Yes, I already think there will be a second book - somewhere down the line.

The point I want to raise in this article is in connection with a sentence that appears in the Introduction:

“My starting point for writing this book is that I wanted to write the book I wish I had read when I was 20, and as I read it back to myself now, I feel that I’ve achieved that goal.”

There were several trigger points, well four actually, in the process that led to me writing Find Time for Exercise. One was when I reached 1,000 days on my at least 5k active journey every single day challenge and a few people commented, “you should write a book about that”, which was a comment I brushed aside for quite some time. Then I gave a couple of talks to audiences in Perth and Stirling, and that got me thinking more about communicating a message about taking more exercise and using physical movement to protect or improve your physical and mental health.

The third trigger was a conversation with someone who encouraged me to write a book and follow that up by offering talks on the subject. The book would be the platform for setting out my thoughts and the live audiences would then provide another medium for promoting a vital message on what is becoming a major worldwide issue – physical inactivity.

The fourth and final trigger point, was the day when I put the first three together in one thought process and came up with the idea of writing the book I wish I’d been able to read when I was 20. 

Rather than being a book about my exercise challenge, it would actually be a self-help book in which the reader, not me, is the central character. The talks I gave in 2015 and 2016 had given me the beginning of a structure for the book, starting with my challenge, looking at the exercise challenges that other people are undertaking and then asking the reader/audience, “So, what are you going to do?”.

The central message in the book is that having an exercise challenge is a great way of providing you with the motivation to succeed, to achieve your goal and continue taking more exercise than you currently take.

That’s a simple, one sentence summary of the book, but the whole story is more compelling and more of a motivational guide to succeeding in your efforts to find time in your busy schedule to look after the most important aspect of your life, your own personal health.

If there is a book on the market that I wish I’d read when I was 20, then it has to be this one.