Ten years of jump rope

As a child I had knock knees. My legs bent inward, so my knees touched while my feet stayed apart. It affected how I walked, and how much I could do in sports.

The exercise for it was simple. I tied my legs together and jumped rope, for about thirty minutes a day. I did it almost every day for more than ten years. By my own count, I missed fewer than 90 days in that whole time. Added up, that’s more than 1,700 hours of jumping rope.

The hard part was never a single day. It was how little seemed to change. You do the same thing in the same place, and after a week nothing looks different. After a month, still nothing you could point to. After several months you start to think something might have changed, and you aren’t sure whether you’re imagining it.

That stretch is the part people skip when they talk about discipline. They talk about the before and the after. In between there is a long period where the work is real and the result is invisible, and the only reason to keep going is that you decided to.

My legs did straighten, a lot. Walking got easier, then sports did, and by high school I was playing competitive soccer.

I don’t think of this as a lesson about work, and I don’t want to turn it into one. It’s just the first time I learned something that has stayed true: discipline is usually boring before it becomes visible.