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Operation Move

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You are here: Home / Archives for Inspiration

Inspiration

How to get excited for all the work that lies ahead

OperationMove · November 11, 2020 · Leave a Comment

Mindset - How to get excited for all the work that lies ahead

 

One thing about starting over is that because you’ve done it before, you know you can do it, but you are also keenly aware of how far you have to go. That can go one of a few ways. It can either be demotivating, or you can approach it in an entirely different way, and get excited about it.

You can’t really kid yourself, it IS going to be a lot of work.

The trap can be that you let that work intimidate you, rather than seeing all the opportunities in it. What’s that old saying, people miss opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like hard work?

It’s a bit like a race, it can scare the pants off you in the beginning, all that road stretched out in front of you. So far to go, no idea what you are capable of or how much it will hurt, or how deep you will have to dig into the well. But also, while we tend to think or races as distances, they are actually a whole bunch of tiny moments strung together. You might think of it as 10km or 21km or whatever, but it’s actually that moment when you got to start and you felt free, and then that bit when you thanked a volunteer for being awesome, and then that kilometre you helped someone out who was struggling and then the moment where you saw a friendly face when you needed it, and then that final stretch when you knew you were going to do the impossible. It only looks like a straight line from far away. So in the beginning, it could feel like you have to grind out all the things you’ve worked so hard for and already done. Or, it could be an opportunity to fall in love with all of those things all over again.

 

Don’t undervalue where you are

Going back to less runs per week or walk/run when you normally would be continuous can feel like a step back, but those building blocks are important and you can enjoy that building process. How often do you get a do-over with the process of learning to run (again) embrace how fun it is to see that big progress week to week.

 

Take your time

It took time to get where you are, it’s okay to take the time again. You might even discover along the way that there’s something you like even more than what you were doing before. It’s a great time for exploration and adventure.

 

All work is worthwhile

Not all work is in workouts, sometimes the work is in building a base that is strong, broad and resilient. That doesn’t mean that work isn’t worthwhile just because it happens to be repetitive.

 

Maybe this is a chance to do something differently

Looking at your running history, has there been an obstacle in your way? Maybe it’s time to re-write your story.


I’m writing a book about how to love running enough for it to change your life.

The book is going to focus on my journey so far, the when the why and the how of the workouts and of training, but also how it all connects to things that are far bigger than running. I’m taking up the challenge of writing a book in 30 days. Which is a lot of writing, but hopefully just enough pressure to keep the momentum going. You can sign up to read the daily words on patreon and get access to a whole range of bonus podcast episodes, and an ebook with 52 running workouts, so you’ll never be stuck for ideas ever again. Stay up to date on:

  • instagram @opmove
  • facebook @opmove
  • Our community group has moved! Check us out at sisterhood.opmove.com

5 ways I get mentally stronger for workouts

OperationMove · November 10, 2020 · Leave a Comment

Title image - mentally stronger for workouts

Getting mentally stronger for workouts, don’t we all want that?

Mentally stronger for workouts or just mentally stronger for life in general. The truth is, my approach to doing things that are hard or overwhelming is exactly the same regardless of whether it’s a project with a deadline, or a workout. It’s all about breaking it down into bite-size pieces. This helps to take me out of overwhelm and into a place where I feel like I can be useful and productive.

Have a plan

A plan calms down all manner of fears. It gives you a path to follow, it gives you options and by creating a little bit of structure you can keep that anxious brain distracted while you get down to work. This might mean talking with your coach about a pace guide for your session, or a certain heart rate range. It might also involve taking down the expectation for the workout. If the idea of running something at 6:30 min/km pace is a bit too intimidating. Take it down to 7:00 and then just see what happens. Nine times out of ten when you aren’t stressed about aiming for a certain pace, you’ll go faster than you think you will.

Do the easy part first

In our case, the easy part is the getting out the door and warming up. Sure, getting out the door might not always feel super easy but that’s usually because of what comes after – not the warm up. So focusing on the easy first steps that you can do helps to put you on auto-pilot.

Break down the hard parts into manageable pieces

I like to break workouts down in a variety of ways. So let’s say if I have 5 x 1km at tempo pace, that’s 5km of work at my 10km race pace. Which is 50% of my actual capacity. See how it sounds way easier? Or if I have 6 x 400m that’s only 2.4km of actual work with loads of recovery in between. Or if I’m doing a fartlek with the intervals at 5km pace and let’s say the intervals are 2:00. A great 5km would take me 24 minutes at the moment. I’m running 1/12th of that. Those types of things help because apprehension of failure is worse than anything that might happen during the session. It should feel good (for the most part!) If it doesn’t, it’s probably an over-reach.

Create milestones

In any workout, I will tick off 1/4 done, 1/3 done, 1/2 done, only 10% to go! It helps to keep mentally ticking off those segments as you work your way through and self-talk your way through some of the tough bits. In reality I’ve had plenty of workouts go really pear shaped, but I’ve always finished them, but in my mind I’m thinking doing 1/2 is good if that’s all I’m able to do, doing 2/3 is great, doing 3/4 is awesome and doing it all is outstanding. So I’m getting little pep talks about where I’m up to the whole way through.

Acknowledge what you just did.

While the temptation might be to downplay your efforts, or focus on the things that you would have liked to have gone better, you need to create the narrative for the next hard thing. If after every session, you focus on what didn’t go well – that’s what you are going to remember next time. So instead of thinking ‘gee that last interval was really slow’, I tend to go with ‘how cool is it that I didn’t have anything in the tank at the end, but I still finished’. Then next time you will remember that you are capable of leaving it all out there and having fun doing it too. Getting mentally stronger for workouts is a whole lot about practice, but it’s also about the story you tell yourself. So make it a good one.  

I’m writing a book about how to love running enough for it to change your life.

The book is going to focus on my journey so far, the when the why and the how of the workouts and of training, but also how it all connects to things that are far bigger than running. I’m taking up the challenge of writing a book in 30 days. Which is a lot of writing, but hopefully just enough pressure to keep the momentum going. You can sign up to read the daily words on patreon and get access to a whole range of bonus podcast episodes, and an ebook with 52 running workouts, so you’ll never be stuck for ideas ever again. Stay up to date on:
  • instagram @opmove
  • facebook @opmove
  • Our community group has moved! Check us out at sisterhood.opmove.com

It’s nearly November. Time for something big.

OperationMove · October 31, 2020 · Leave a Comment

“It is only process that saves us from the poverty of our intentions.” – Elizabeth King

I’m a person who needs a deadline. In everything. In my technical writing career it was often commented that possibly I skated a little too close to that line. But without it, I end up being a victim of too much time and not enough pressure.

I have always meant to write that book, but there’s always time, you know?

Except that’s only true if you do the work. And I have not been doing the work.

And here we are, the day before November. You might not have heard of it but NaNoWriMo has been going for many years. (National Novel Writing Month) and the premise is that instead of taking years, you take 30 days to write your 50,000 word novel. Now, I’m not writing a novel, but I am using the structure to create just the kind of pressure I need.

My project is – Run Your Heart Out – part running memoir, part training theory and application. Everything I wish every runner could know to create joy and confound their own expectations. And I’ll be releasing daily words on my patreon support page if you’d like to take a peek at what I’m working on.

But, as my book is probably not going to be as long as a traditional novel (or need to be!) I’ll also be doing one blog post per day and adding that to my overall word count. Side note: if you subscribe to get blog posts via email and don’t want to get an email every day, now might be a great time to update your preferences!

I got a great reminder today that there’s no such thing as writers block, there’s just a fear of bad writing. But there is no way around it, the only way is through.

There are always points where you think you should give yourself an ‘out’. Yesterday I got confirmation on another grant writing project which is due in at the beginning of December. That would be easy for me to say, I can’t do this right now. But the truth is, there’s always something. And this time, I’ve decided to keep myself on the hook.

I’m going to need all the support I can get. If you have any specific questions or topics you feel isn’t well covered, I would love to hear them.

Support this Project

Mental toughness requires more softness than you think it does

OperationMove · August 25, 2020 · Leave a Comment

When I ask people what they most need, it’s usually all about mental toughness, resilience, mindset.

We live in a world full of people who believe the only way to toughness and grittiness and resilience is baptism by fire.

But the part that gets skipped over is where you have to trust yourself to survive the fire, you have to believe that you can and you have to love yourself enough that you are undaunted by failure.

You can’t hate your way into belief, you can’t self-loathe your way into trust and you can’t shame your way into fearlessness.

It’s in the skipping over, that you can lose your way.

When you are continually under-valuing your effort and over-emphasising where you struggled, it’s easy to get stuck in a shame spiral.

Sometimes, you know I get out the door and I think to myself ‘that was a fucking miracle’. And it could be for any reason – I didn’t sleep well, or I’m feeling sad that day or one of my kids said something kind of innocuous but also deeply hurtful in the way that kids do but don’t realise they do. Maybe my bones feel tired, or I feel unappreciated or I feel like a crappy parent or a worse human or maybe I just wanted to snuggle up with the cats and hide from the world.

Any day, there are a million reasons to not go and maybe five that you want to.

So yeah, it can be a miracle.

And once that miracle has happened, well once you are out the door that is like a bonus round for anything that happens it’s icing.

I have a thing that I do mostly with intervals or a run where I’m not purely running easy. In my mind anything over 50% is a win. So when I’m half way – I figure that’s a good day, if I get to two thirds that’s a great day, three quarters that is outstanding and 100% well that is incredible. Because I know that showing up is the hard part.

You have to believe in your capacity for mental toughness before you can practice it and that takes a whole lot of kindness first.

Sometimes it takes a lot of time to find that kindness for yourself, and that’s okay. It’s okay for it to feel hard. It’s okay for it to take time to realise you don’t have to ‘deserve’ kindness – that it can just be taken in like oxygen into your lungs.

You do hard things all the time. You demonstrate mental toughness all the time. The challenge isn’t in doing it, the challenge is in being able to see yourself and recognise all the moments of greatness that you sweep under the rug, unnoticed because you don’t believe that is who you are.

The secret is you are never going to feel like it

Zoey · November 9, 2017 · 2 Comments

Do you want to know what that big secret is that people who don’t struggle to train consistently week in, week out, month after month, year after year is?

They aren’t waiting until they feel like it.

They know that they are never going to wake up one morning at 5am psyched for bootcamp or amped to go for a run or jumping for joy because they’ve got that burpee box jump workout at Crossfit later.

In fact, they know they are never going to feel like it.

I once read an article that recommended running a marathon ‘how you feel on the day’. And someone commented if they were running how they felt like, they’d be walking. And it’s true of almost anything. I never feel like folding clothes or doing dishes or cooking dinner either. But I don’t expect to, so it just gets done and I don’t even think about if I feel like it or not.

But, sometimes I do feel like it, I hear you say.

And that’s true too. That weekend run where you get to sleep a bit longer and it’s your long run so it’s at a comfortable pace and you get to maybe meet up with friends after for coffee. You look forward to that. The truth is that the runs or workouts you look forward to, probably don’t happen as often as you think they might or should. And while you might feel like going for a run on occasion, that’s no competition for the grind. The grind is the three mornings a week I get up at 4am to be at Crossfit at 5am. Do I love it? Absolutely. Do I feel like it when that alarm goes off? No way! The grind is hill sprints on the steepest hill in town and not those fun 150m ones I did this week but the 300m ones that will teach you to hate your life. The grind is the same repetitive 5km run you do three times a week that never changes. The grind is getting out of bed when your muscles are having too many feelings. And the grind is even getting to bed early so you can get out of bed.

No one feels like the grind.

If you wait until you feel like it, it’s never going to happen.

So, you don’t wait. You learn that it doesn’t matter whether you feel like it or not. In fact you get so good at it, that you don’t even notice if you feel like it anymore. Your brain has helpfully shuttled that information off into the non-relevant pile a long time ago.

Did you know that some of our genes are only expressed if we are exposed to the cold? So at a basic level, if you want to adapt you have to be willing to experience discomfort.

That’s the secret.

It’s not that some people are super motivated, they are just independent to motivation. You are never going to feel like it. So don’t wait.

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