I used to think serenity was something that would eventually happen to me. As if I’d someday be able to say, “My serenity date is…” Turns out, for me it’s a lot less like a a road-to-Damascus moment and more like physical fitness: a condition built through consistent effort over time.

I have had a few of those miraculous moments, praise God, but they’re just that: miracles sent when I desperately needed them. Miracles are for when I’m helpless. But there’s plenty of day-to-day stuff I can do to help myself towards serenity.

I started my physical fitness and recovery journeys at about the same time: no coincidence, as I discovered the magic power of exercise to keep me sane. And each helps me understand the other. Among the many parallels between serenity and physical fitness:

It’s a process, not an event. Serenity isn’t a state I achieve once and then camp there; it’s not a merit badge. It fluctuates, and that’s normal. There’s a lot I can do to keep it in the positive range, and my serenity level depends on my consistently doing those things.

It’s a lot like my cardio fitness: I have a baseline, but my actual level varies with my training. It’s not the same on race day as it is after a few weeks off. And just because I got that medal last season doesn’t guarantee I’m in the same condition today. I have to consistently contribute to it.

There’s no resting on laurels. I can’t live off yesterday’s serenity; I have to do today’s work to make room for today’s serenity.

It takes effort. As much as I wish the Fitness Fairy would wave her wand over me, it hasn’t happened. The Serenity Fairy hasn’t shown up yet either. I can wish for it, wait for it, pray for it, but not much is gonna happen unless I work for it.

Doing my spiritual workouts means working my program to the best of my ability: meetings, step work, service, keeping my side of the street clean, staying current with my feelings, rigorous honesty in my daily inventory, and prompt obedience when my Higher Power pokes me. That’s a lot. But the alternative is being spiritually weak (read: crazy). The effort is always worth it.

There are no shortcuts. There’s no magic formula to physical fitness. Show up, do the work, repeat. Oh, and eat right. That’s it. There’s nothing mysterious about it. But there’s no shortcut either.

Program is like that too: simple, but not easy. Show up, do the work, repeat. There is no substitute for doing the work: share at meetings, get a sponsor, work the Steps, be of service. Just going to meetings isn’t enough. “Half measures avail us nothing,” the Big Book of AA says. It takes the whole program to restore me to sanity. I need every single tool, all the time.

Consistency is key. Doing a little bit every day moves me farther than doing a lot once in a while. And can I just be honest? Consistency is the absolute hardest thing for me, both in fitness and in program. It’s so easy to make excuses. Interestingly, feeling good is as strong a temptation to slack off as feeling bad. Maybe I want to use that energy for other things, or maybe I’m feeling less crazy than usual and decide to coast for awhile.

The key to consistency is commitment. Decide it’s important, schedule it, and then do it no matter how you feel. Don’t let feelings make the decision. My disease brain is absolutely genius at coming up with excuses, and relying on feelings as motivation puts me in the ditch every time.

Having trouble making a regular meeting? Take a service position, or offer to give someone a ride every week. Make a coffee date with a program friend after the meeting. Do what it takes to get yourself to show up. Take a little inventory, of course; maybe your gut is telling you something. But if it’s a healthy meeting and you just need to get your butt there, commit yourself.

You’ll hit plateaus. When we’re new and enthusiastic (or desperate), we tend to make rapid progress. Sooner or later, most of us hit a plateau; doing the same old thing isn’t bringing the same results anymore. This feels discouraging, but it’s a normal part of the process.

Accept it, and then get busy moving the baseline: ask your HP for guidance and then add another meeting, get involved in a new level of service, do a new inventory, take whatever opportunities present themselves. Those opportunities often don’t come wrapped the way I’d like, but they’re still gifts. (Thanks, Larcine!)

It has to be a priority. Physical fitness doesn’t happen by accident, and spiritual fitness won’t either. If I “plan” to work out if I have time, it doesn’t happen. Similarly, when my program gets the leftovers of my time, I stop making progress.

The very first thing that goes in my planner each week is my regular meetings. Second, workouts. Then, everything else. And yes, I have a full-time job and family commitments. I schedule my life around my program, because if I try to fit it in around the edges, it gets crowded out. Then I get crazy again.

Comparison is a killer. Seeing others’ progress can be great inspiration. But it turns toxic when I compare myself to that person and start whining about all the reasons I can’t accomplish the same things. This happens sometimes while I’m setting up in transition at triathlons: I see the expensive bikes, hear people talk about their personal trainers, and think, Ugh, I’ll never reach that level.

In program it’s easy to look at others and think they got where they are because they have advantages I don’t. But in reality, it’s a lot simpler than triathlon. If I want what someone else has, I have to be willing to do what they did to get it. No fancy equipment needed.

Admiring others’ accomplishments and being inspired by them can be motivating. But I’m not in competition with anyone. I’m there for my own growth–to challenge myself and make the most of myself. That’s true in racing and in program.

Use it or lose it. It takes only about three weeks of slacking to set me back months of training. And then it’s work, work, work just to get back to the same level. The same is true in program: anytime I’m not making forward progress, I’m sliding back. There’s no standing still. I’m either feeding the disease or building my recovery.

Rest days are vital, but when they turn into extended time off, I lose progress. The same is true in recovery. I need to do something every day, however small, to practice my new way of living. However tiny it is, it renews my commitment to my recovery and helps keep me from slipping back into my old sick thinking.

Progress takes time. Get-fit-quick programs tend to lead to injuries, or burnout, or both. Stable gains are only made over time.

Program gains don’t happen overnight, either. Many a newcomer leaves discouraged because they haven’t found all the answers by their second meeting. Real change takes time. Give yourself that time. It’s okay if you aren’t all fixed in a month, or a year, or even a decade.

One of the most encouraging things for me is listening to old-timers share about their struggles. Struggles? Yes, because it reminds me that there’s no cutoff date. I don’t have to have everything figured out by a certain age or a certain number of years in the program. It’s okay to be here a long time and still have issues. It took me years to get this sick; recovery might take longer than a couple of weeks.

When I hear someone with a strong 30-plus years in program share that they just discovered some new forgiveness work they need to do, or someone who’s taken 80 trips around the sun learning something new about themselves, it gives me great hope for my own future. It’s never too late to grow.

Progress is personal. One thing I love about running is that I’m only competing with myself. Yes, it’s a race, but my goal is always to improve my personal best time, not to beat someone else. That’s my motivation.

And that’s a good thing, because I will never “beat” the people who started decades younger than me, who have different body types, or who don’t have the same physical challenges. It doesn’t matter if my big distance goal is someone else’s warmup. I can still celebrate my progress because I’m only comparing myself to myself. The person I want to beat is the old, lazy, cowardly me. And I beat her every time I show up and give my best.

The same is true of program. When I first came in, all my competitiveness started twitching; I wanted to be just like the old-timers who seemed to know everything. It took me awhile to settle down and realize that recovery is not a contest. We all have different starting points and different challenges. What’s routine for someone else might be an amazing victory for me, and vice versa. And that’s totally okay.

My inventory is my starting point; once I have awareness of where I am, then I can start to recognize what progress looks like for me. Then I can quit comparing my insides with others’ outsides and get to work on myself.

There’s no such thing as catching up. Recently during a very busy season of family commitments, I let my physical and spiritual workouts slide. The totally predictable result? I got sick physically, and spent more time sitting on my butt recovering than I would have spent just making time to take care of myself.

I had some shaky moments program-wise too, and fell back into some crazy behaviors I thought I’d left behind. Know what? The ditch doesn’t move! There’s no such thing as behaviors I’ve left behind, only behaviors that by God’s grace I’m not doing today. And receiving that grace depends a lot on my doing the work.

My very wrong reasoning: I’ll catch up later. But in truth there’s no such thing as catching up. I’m not even picking up where I left off. That prolonged break caused me to slide backwards. Now I have to work to get out of the hole before I can make any more progress. Ugh!

Pro tip: This disease does not take breaks. It’s out in the parking lot doing push-ups waiting for me, as the AAs say. And they’re right. When I take a break from my program, I’m putting myself at the mercy of my disease. That is a bad place to be. Keeping up is worth whatever I sacrifice in time and effort.

Use the buddy system. When a friend in another state and I were struggling to get our miles in, we decided to become run buddies. We couldn’t physically run together, but we set goals and sent each other our run stats every day, along with favorite songs to add to our running playlists. It was great motivation, and we both hit our goals. That extra bit of accountability–just knowing he was counting on me and I had committed to report my progress to him–got me over the hump.

It works in program too. Need help practicing some program tool? Get someone else involved as your accountability buddy. Having trouble doing your 10th Step consistently? Commit to share it with someone for a week. Struggling with gratitude? Check in daily or weekly by texting each other your gratitude lists. Call a friend and commit to visit an extra meeting this week together, or read the same piece of CAL and meet to talk about it. Plan to chair a meeting together. Knowing someone else is counting on you can help you get moving.

A good coach is a godsend. A couple of years into running, I developed serious pain in my hip. I got new shoes, changed my stretching routine, took ridiculous amounts of ibuprofen. Nothing helped.

When I mentioned the problem to my son, who has extensive fitness experience, he replied, “You’re probably overstriding. Your heel shouldn’t be past your knee when it contacts the ground. I’ll send you some videos.” Problem solved! In a couple of weeks I was running pain-free.

I can’t always see my missteps in program, either. I need a spiritual coach who has experience using the program tools to help me see what I can do different or better. That’s my sponsor! When the way I’m responding to a situation is causing me pain, she helps diagnose the problem.

I have trouble seeing my progress, too, and she reflects that to me, reminding me how much I’ve grown.

In running, I can compare my past and current times and see I’ve improved. It’s hard to be objective about my own spiritual growth in the same way, but she keeps my “stats” and cheers my progress. I can look at how I’ve handled the same incidents in a different way and see my growth, but sometimes my disease thinking obscures my view and I need that outside voice to help me see clearly.

No effort is wasted. “The only bad workout is the one you don’t do.” Ha, ha! Some workouts really suck. But just getting out there and doing it is a win. And often it’s the ones I most don’t feel like doing that bring the most gains later.

The same is true of program. I might feel like I didn’t get a lot out of that meeting (and if I do feel that way, I need to check my attitude), but just being there is an act of service, and showing up affirms my commitment to my recovery. I might feel I wasn’t much help to that person who called me, or that my share was cringeworthy, but I can never really know the impact I had, and my willingness to be of service is a gift in itself.

The effort we give when we don’t feel like it can be what moves us forward most. Willingness is 99% of the battle. If I show up and give whatever I have to give that day, even if it doesn’t look like much, my Higher Power has something to work with and I can leave the results up to Him.

It’s a gift. Whenever I get cocky and start to think of physical fitness as my accomplishment (or worse, think of myself as some kind of badass for accomplishing it), my Higher Power is faithful to remind me: it’s a gift.

Usually this blessing comes in the form of an illness or injury that sidelines me and reminds me that after I’ve done all in my power to be healthy, the gift of life and health is ultimately not in my control. It’s still up to God.

That’s hard to swallow. Ego says that after all the work I put in, I deserve it! But ego is not my amigo, as they say. And the same is true in program: after all my efforts, God doesn’t owe me serenity, or anything else. I can’t earn it, and I can’t achieve it. The work “makes us ready to receive the priceless gift of serenity,” as the Suggested Opening says. But the gift always comes from Him. Serenity is grace received.

You’ve probably seen it in football: the quarterback throws the ball right into the receiver’s arms, but if he isn’t prepared, he doesn’t catch it. Grace is like that too. Doing the work helps put me in position to catch it. I still drop a lot more than I catch. It’s a good thing my HP is always ready to throw me another one.

Keep coming back!