But we all want things-human longing knows no bounds-and plenty of people do genuinely throw themselves into trying something new, without much success at converting those behaviors into lasting habits. Stories like my dad’s often serve as pop-psychological proof that you, too, could become a runner, if you really wanted to. You tell yourself that, this time, you’re really going to do God-knows-what differently, but all too soon you’re reminded that forever is a pretty long time to keep it up. New beginnings are seductive, and so is our own capacity for change. And it’s a salient dynamic at the beginning of a new year, resolution or not.

My experience is extremely common among people who want to change how they do all kinds of things: to waste less money, to floss, to quit smoking, to drink less, to learn a new language. I’ve tried to form various exercise habits over the years-I bought the equipment, I made a plan, I got out there and did it-and never quite reached the automatic stage, even though I observed it at close range for my entire childhood. Right now, I work out once or twice a week, which is less than I’d like to. It’s a deceptively simple fantasy-and, so often, an impossible one. Now, when my dad doesn’t run, “I feel like I’ve lost something,” he told me.įor a lot of people, this is, without exaggeration, the dream: You decide you’d like to start doing something, you get past the initial phase of this new activity being hard and bad and a huge bummer, and then you do that thing for 40 years. “It was the cool thing to do at the time for people like me,” he said of the 1980s fitness boom. When I asked him why he started all those years ago, there was no great motivator, no epiphany. One day he wasn’t a jogger, and the next day he was, even if he didn’t know at the time that the change was indeed permanent. He started a few years before I was born. My dad will turn 75 next week, and whenever you’re reading this, he has probably already been out for a run today. He was just running, like he had basically every day since time immemorial. There was no specific goal, no endpoint, no particular reason he couldn’t take the week off while in the greater Disney World metropolitan area, which, in July, is hotter than the surface of the sun.

Every day, at least four or five miles, rising before the sun and before anyone else was awake. When I was a kid, my dad did something on family vacations that perplexes me to this day: He ran.

Power to the people stick it to the man