Coming Out Of Winter
After months of darkness, the light is making a welcome return. Spring is here and it feels good.
As I build exercise into every single day, the return of daylight makes a big difference to my plans for getting outside for a run, walk or cycle ride. As we turn the corner into March each year, I look forward to all those outdoor journeys in natural light over the next eight months or so.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the adventure of going out in the dark to walk or run by the light of the moon and to look up at the stars. I also enjoy cycling with a powerful light on the front of my bike or running with my headtorch on. Indeed, at the end of October, I feel enthused by being out in the dark because I know that’s how I’m going to be taking a lot of my exercise for the next four months, but by the end of February, I have to admit to yearning for the light to return.
I should say at this point, that I do make a big effort through the winter to get out on lunchtimes, because it is good for us humans to see some daylight, especially when it is in short supply, so a lot of my ‘at least 5-kilometre’ journeys between November and February are on lunchtimes in order to get some natural daylight into my eyes.
But now that the spring is getting into its swing, and with all those well-lit months ahead of us, I think this is the best time of year to be setting a physical exercise challenge and forming new good habits.
New year’s resolutions are great, if you can make them last well into the future, but quite often the reason for ones relating to exercise in the outdoors fail is because they require us to start when the days are short, the nights are long, and the weather is probably at its wildest. When you think of it like that, it’s perhaps no great surprise that so many new year’s resolutions don’t make it beyond the end of January.
As I explain in Find Time for Exercise, I have a routine I follow in March each year of moving my day to better fit with the daylight that is available. For the month of March, I get up an hour earlier than normal to get an extra hour of daylight, then go to bed an hour earlier than normal, because it is dark by then anyway. I see this as shifting to British Summer Time a month earlier than everyone else, and the benefit is that I see an extra hour of daylight each day instead of sleeping through it and missing it.
Anyway, whatever time you get up and go to bed, with the lengthening days at this time of year, this is a great time to start a new exercise challenge. If you can start a new routine in March and keep it going over the summer months, then you’re likely to form a habit that you won’t want to let go of. If you keep a routine going for six months, then the chances are you will be determined to keep it going for twelve months, and then more.
Start with a modest challenge and see how it goes. You can always tone it down if you’ve bitten off a bit more than you can chew, and equally, you could make it a bit harder if you started out with something that you find is too easy.
Good luck if you do decide to set out on a new challenge over the next few weeks and do get in touch by email or social media if you have any questions.
