Lessons from an experiment

Today, I completed a year of running at least a mile every day.

It started out as an experiment to see if I could do it for the whole month of January 2010, and it carried on from there.

There were a number of factors that led to me over achieving my goal:

• I defined it as an experiment rather than a goal. Failure is OK with an experiment so the pressure is off. It should be OK with a goal too, but all too often when I fail with a goal I'm inclined to give up. Interesting that when I had permission to fail I chose not to.

• I set a daily target that I knew was achieveable. I knew I could run a mile, however slowly at least for one day, even if I didn't feel that great. Then I just had to do it for the next day, and so on. Also, running a mile only meant getting up 15 minutes earlier. Even if I had to get up at 5.00 a.m. somehow 15 minutes earler didn't seem that much different.

• I told a few people but not loads, so I had some accountability to be my word and yet I wasn't in danger of suffering total humiliation if I failed.

How could my lessons of running a mile each day be applicable to you and your achievement of your goals or experiments?

And by the way, my experiment is continuing into 2011 if you fancy joining me.

To follow my experiment, see my A Mile each Day blog or my Run a mile each day Facebook page