Victims of Conditioning

After 30 years of sedentary living (where the most active thing I did was probably running to catch the train) I started working out at the gym 3 times a week last October. By November I was on an offsite program with UTI at a hotel without access to a gym.

I was sufficiently gung-ho about making up for the missed work-out to get up at 5:30 and jog on the beach for an hour - which I continued for all the programs until one day it started to rain... and I said to myself "I'm not so passionate about this that I want to do it in the rain" and I went back to sleep.

One hour later, enjoying a cup of coffee on the balcony; I was explaining to Kaushik (my room-mate) why I had skipped the run. Kaushik looked out to the ocean and saw some fisherman in a boat, and commented "For you, running was an option; when it was raining you had the luxury of choosing to quit. For them [the fisherman], fishing is a livelihood - rain or shine they have to go out there"

This led me to thinking... why couldn't I have run? I was running barefoot (so no worries about stinky shoes), the other clothes wouldn't have suffered if they got wet (they anyway got sweaty), and I would take a shower after the jog anyway. So, there was really no reason why I couldn't have jogged, except for the deep-rooted conditioning from my younger days: "Don't get wet in the rain, you'll fall sick."

How often does it happen that some outdated conditioning deprives us of making the best use of the opportunities around us? Probably more often than we realize, given that you usually don't recognize the conditioning in yourself.