Habits

I've been thinking a lot about habits the last few days, both good and bad.  I heard it said a long time ago that if you do something for 21 days, that it will become a habit.  It doesn't matter if its something good, or bad, just the act of repeating the same activity for that amount of time tends to imprint it rather deeply into our brains.

A web search reveals that this may not necessarily be true.  It really depends on the habit and how drastic of a change it is to our "normal" behaviour.  Simple things, like drinking a glass of water a day, could become a habit in as few as 18 days, but something more profound, like doing 50 sit-ups everyday before breakfast could take much, much longer.

Why all this talk of habits, you might ask.  Its because I've started developing the habit of riding my bike several times per week.  In fact, for the last 5 and a half weeks, I've averaged almost 4 rides per week.  That's 21 rides in 39 days.  Seems like its becoming a habit to get out there and ride.  I know it is becoming a habit, because I haven't ridden in 3 days and I'm really missing it!  In fact I just did a quick tally and came up with a total of 175.83 miles ridden during those 39 days and 226.47 miles ridden so far this year.

Now, I've been doing a bit of math, and having been inspired by fizzhogg in his blog 2k in 2k10 Unfat Project, and having done a bit more math, I'm setting a goal for myself for total miles biked in 2012.  That total is  2012 miles.  I figure its an easy number to remember and not a bad slogan "2012 in 2012."  In order to accomplish this feat, I simply have to average 55 miles per week for the rest of the year.

As soon as I do a bit more research I'm going to see how I can put some type of ticker on here to show miles so far this year and miles left to meet my goal.

Anyone want to join me in this?