The Power of Incremental Progress

Recently, one of the things that I do at the beginning of the morning walk is to listen to TED Talks for about the first mile or mile and a half.  It usually takes about that length of time for Rory to get out and about and walking.  To be fair to him, his time zone is an hour behind mine, so he's out and about at an eye watering early hour.

This morning the topic of the lecture was the lessons that Roz Savage has learned through her practice of ocean rowing.  Ms. Savage is the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. She has covered over 15,000 miles in over 500 days alone on the ocean, and her story is one of inspiration for me.

I sense a kind of kinship between her rowing and my walking.  Clearly, she's taking the bigger risks, but the part of her TED Talk that I especially related to was the power of incremental progress.

Anacostia River Walk Bridge - East Side

When I first started training for the N2N-TCP, I had it in mind to stick with ten miles per day for thirty days because I felt that would be a sufficient amount of time to convince myself that this crazy idea of mine was just that...a crazy idea.

Anacostia River Walk Bridge - West End

The walking was very difficult in the beginning.  I did not have to correct shoes and socks, blisters were a daily struggle, shin splints took a mile to get loosened up, and, since I started in the fall, the weather taught me some tough lessons about what was appropriate clothing and what wasn't.

Through those first thirty days, what I didn't see right away was that from the very beginning, I was making incremental progress.  One short step at a time, I was learning along the way.  That learning hasn't stopped, and instead of convincing me of my own lunacy, walking has become part of what I practice daily and part of my life in a way I never imagined.

There is great power in incremental progress, but that power can only be accessed by taking the first small step and then carrying through to take the next one.