Operation Move
Online Running Coaching
How did you go with your moving minutes for January? What was your total? I think I ended up about the 1,500 minute mark which I am very happy with, especially during summer school holidays! This month I thought we’d do something a bit different, and I hope you’ll join in! We’d love to see you in the Facebook Community Group so we can keep each other motivated. Or if you prefer you can join in on instagram with the hashtag $opmovefeb.
Who is ready for an amazing February?
I know. It seems out there. Stay with me.
This morning I was listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast. I’m way behind. Two years behind because I like to go back and listen from the beginning. Lots of interview style podcasts will have certain questions that they will ask everyone, and having that common thread makes it even more interesting to me. One of the questions is “what are you world class at?” which can be a kind of confronting question if you are used to being a humble or a modest person.
But I was thinking about that today on my run and the thing that I am world class at is improving systems. I know it sounds really boring. I spent five years working for a drug and alcohol rehabilitation charity and a huge part of my work was taking an organisation with no administrative systems to having policies and procedures and systems that worked like clockwork with no single point of fail, but more importantly systems for continually improving. When I was implementing all of those things I was not a very popular person, because I not only had to convince people to do it, I also had to convince them as to why it is important.
You only have to ask the coaches in Learn to Run and they will tell you how often I change things in the program. It’s in a constant state of imporvement. I add things, I take things away, I fine tune things. CONSTANTLY. Almost to the point where I can’t quite keep up with it. If you love something and you appreciate something, you love it enough and respect it enough to continually reinvest in it and make it better. Nothing is ever done. Nothing is ever complete. There is always room for more. There is always room for better.
Which is a bit like populist politics at the moment, don’t you think? People will try to convince you (especially coming up to Australia Day) that if you have any criticism about Australia, you should leave, or you aren’t patriotic. But I think it’s the oppostie of that. Patriotism is loving your country enough to recognise it’s great strengths, celebrate it’s great achievements and love it enough to make changes.
In January, I kind of think about loving your body in the same way. There’s a tension between people wanting to appreciate their body, but also wanting to change it. How can you love something, if you want to change it? But you can do both. And more than that, you can love your body for what it can do, even when you aren’t particularly keen on what it looks like. The hard part I guess is separating that out. There is no situation where you should withdraw that love and appreciation from your body. It doesn’t respond to shame and punishment as well as you’d think. But it doesn’t mean you can’t be dedicated to improvement either. There are things I’d like to change and that’s ok. Willingness to improve is willingness to invest even more in what my body can do.
So the next time you think about improving something, remember that’s a sign of love, not rejection.
Have you ever noticed how when you are so overwhelmed about what you have to do, you do nothing? Because that’s pretty much how the human brain works. Helpful. But also very likely to happen during school holidays. I love school holidays. I love that I can have a sleep in and not make school lunches and we can do fun things and probably most importantly I don’t have daily battles about school uniforms and freaking socks and even more importantly I don’t have to worry about separation anxiety that happens during the year.
But the reality of school holidays is that as much as the girls are pretty good at entertaining themselves, I get almost nothing done. It’s not that I don’t have time, exactly. It’s more that I don’t have any focused or uninterrupted time. Every five minutes someone needs frozen raspberries or milk or second breakfast or that doll they didn’t care about but are now absolutely beside themselves desperate to find. All of which I tend to forget during term, because I have blocks of time to get stuff done so having to fulfil a list of demands at 5 minute intervals kind of flies under the radar when they are home.
At first you don’t really notice it because it’s novel and it’s Christmas but as I near towards week 5 and week 6 of my school holiday marathon I really notice it. It goes beyond work too, I can’t seem to stick to my regular training schedule either. I begin to have doubts about what I should be doing, the structure of my programming, all of it gets drown in a big bag of overwhelmed, indecisive second guessing.
Some of this might have something to do with packing up and moving and new mortgages and contracts, but still I’m pretty sure this happens every year. Or some version of it does. And it couples with this intense desire to treat the arbitrary new year date as some kind of beginning point for whatever I’m doing. But I don’t know what I’m doing. You see my problem.
The good news is I have an end point. We move on the 8th February, and we hand back the keys to our rental property a week later so we can get all the cleaning stuff done and the girls (thankfully) go back to school the week before that. You can withstand almost anything if you have an end point.
Even so, I don’t do a month of limbo very well, so I had to come up with something. I couldn’t face my normal sessions so I’ve just been running. Sometimes when you are a highly structured person, you can forget that this is a thing you can do. I often don’t really know how far or how long I’m going to go for, sometimes it’s slow, mostly it’s easy and sometimes I completely change what I’m doing half way through.
Going through a period of overwhelm it would have been really easy to do nothing. Write it off as a period where I just wasn’t going to be doing anything and settle in to my festivity slothdom and that would have been ok, but it wouldn’t have been great. I’m continually telling people in Learn to Run that you don’t need motivation to go, you can just go. So for this month, I’m just running. And the view from here is pretty outstanding.