Some goals in life are more of a journey than others. Anyone who has been aiming for financial independence can tell you that paying off debt is a marathon, not a sprint.

A No Spend Week is like a sprint, but when you finish, you don’t get to binge buy nights eating out and a new wardrobe. That defeats the purpose. You still have to continue slow and steady.

Also, sometime you will eat out 4 nights in a week or pay way too much for a pretty black dress that will shortly thereafter be stolen on a whim. There are setbacks in the marathon to financial independence all the time.

I’ve been running the financial independence marathon for about 6 years. The first 2 years, I aimlessly staggered along with the single goal of maxing out my IRA each year, but for the last 4, I’ve been a serious financial marathon trainer.

That being said, it can be easy to forget what it’s like for someone struggling to get started.

I say this, because the absolute first thing I thought of about 30 seconds into my first run while training for that 5K this weekend was – this is just like personal finance.

And it sucks.

I know it’s good for me, but it sucks.

In the personal finance side of my life, I think it’s super easy to prioritize maxing out my IRA and adding $1,000 to my emergency fund each year. I will cut back without even thinking much about how I’m doing it, because those activities are such a high priority to me. And each deposit into each of those accounts feels like a victory – not like I’m setting away money I don’t get to spend.

However, when you’re just starting out, the prospect of finding $6,500 in your budget to do that may seem impossible.

It’s like getting up off your couch from never exercising and running a 5K.

The first day I ran anywhere, the training program was set to have me run for 1 minute and 30 seconds and the walk for 3 minutes and alternate that for 20 minutes.

I thought, of course I can do that! I survived gym in high school with no problem. I scoffed at the 1 minute and 30 seconds as I hit start on the app.

Turns out that when you are 100% out of shape, running 1 minute and 30 seconds is quite the accomplishment. An accomplishment that I only managed to do about half the time in that first run.

To make things even better, after I finished that run, all I could do was think there was absolutely no way I would ever run 3.1 miles! I hated everything about what I was doing. My lungs hurt. My knees hurt. Everything was stupid and pointless.

It took pretty much all the willpower in me to do it again two days later. And I still couldn’t complete the training circuit!

That was also when I remembered that people accomplish different things at different times and as long as you’re trying your best and moving forward, what more can you expect of yourself? So I let go of the feeling that I was failing and decided that at least if I managed to run longer than I had the previous time, I was doing ok. And that there was no shame in repeating a lesson on the Couch to 5K app if I hadn’t succeeded at it yet.

The same is true with so many aspects of personal finance. It’s normal to struggle to get into the habit of tracking your finances, controlling impulse spending and switching to a frugal lifestyle. You’re just going to fail sometimes and the best you can do in the beginning is try again the next day and make sure you do a little better than the previous day.

I thought about that day in the beginning of June when I could run 1 minute 30 as I sailed through 20 minutes of running at the beginning of August. Even just 2 months had changed what my body was capable of doing to such an extent that it would’ve seemed impossible to June Mel.

What can you achieve if you just taking it one step at a time and keep moving?