Motivation is a funny thing; it can be the deciding factor between sitting on your butt and running your butt off or, in certain scenarios, between having your brains eaten and surviving in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  OK, so running for survival isn’t exactly a primary form of motivation for most of us today, but it was for our ancestors and for some of my favorite characters in zombie movies.  Also, it will be for me and hopefully some friends come May for the 5K Run For Your Lives in Boston.  So we won’t really be running for our lives, but we will be running for fun.

I think in today’s world, running for fun is really important.  It is hard work and it helps us achieve our goals of weight loss and physical fitness. At the same time though, we need to be able to enjoy it.  Next year, I plan to take part in as many “fun runs” as I possibly can.  Between the Warrior Dash, Run For Your Lives, The Original Mud Run, Spartan Race, and any others that I can find and afford to go to.

But what do we do in the meantime while we are training to comfortably run in races like that?  Trail running, as Jono talked about in his post last Thursday, seems to be the best solution to break up the monotony of hitting the pavement or the treadmill.  With only a few weeks left until it is too cold (for some of us) to run outside, we will have to really dig deep to keep our motivation going strong through the winter. Being able to look forward to some of the fun runs will be good motivation to hit the treadmill.