Last week I showed up at my gym for a 9:15 class and was confused – for a time that's usually packed, attendance was down by about two-thirds. Our trainer explained that people often avoid benchmark days when results are recorded for comparisons over time.

I get it. I've been going to this gym for nearly 9 years and at some point in the middle of that tenure this was me. Most of the time I avoided the class or if I was (accidentally) there I or would brush off the results and tell them not to bother writing it in my file. 

I behaved this way because I was intimidated by the data points. Instead of accepting my current fitness level, I was subconsciously holding myself to the standards of the collegiate athlete I used to be over a decade and a half prior. As a working professional striving for a full life, the expectation that I should still be training at an elite level was setting me up for constant disappointment.

To minimize the frustration and pain of not...