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You are here: Home / Archives for Inspiration

Inspiration

Fall in love with the process of running, not the goal

Zoey · July 18, 2016 · Leave a Comment

Champions are made in practice

For me, running is a lifestyle and an art. I’m more interested in the magic of it than the mechanics – Lorraine Moller

In the past when I’ve warned people off setting a goal as an end-point, they’ve responded as though I was quite mad. After all, I’m a running coach, isn’t that what I do? And aren’t I always encouraging people to set goals and running in races, aren’t they end-point goals?

And they would be half right. Goal setting IS very important. Goals that are a little bit scary will get you out of bed in the morning. Scary goals will put the fear of God into you and get you out the door. Goals will tell you when you are doing well and when you need to readjust (if they are set using a context of being specific, measurable and realistic). But, they are never an end point.

It’s like me attempting to use reward charts with my kids (which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t) – once they get the reward after getting ten stars or whatever it is they lose all interest in both the reward chart and the behaviour that I might have been trying to teach them out. In fact the reward chart becomes this huge thing and their ability to even understand what I’m trying to teach them is so outside of their consciousness that it might as well not exist.

Running goals are the same. If you are solely focused on running 5km, or any distance or running at a particular pace or at a particular event and that is your only goal you will rapidly lose interest in running once you get there. You achieved it! You made it to your end point.And things end at end-points. So where did you go wrong?

Setting a longer term goal can help for sure. Which is why it’s great to set short-term goals like 4 weeks and 2 months but it’s also good to set 6 month and 2 year goals. But it’s part of a bigger problem. You’ve fallen in love with how a certain goal looks on you and not actually fallen in love with running itself. Because the running is a means to an end, it’s been kind of viewed as a necessary evil. Or even if you do love running, it’s become secondary.

There was a meme going around a few years ago riffing off The Matrix where a runner would be offered a blue pill to be able to run forever injury free but they would never get any faster than they are. Or they could take the red pill and run a fast race and get faster every year for five years but then they would get injured and never be able to run again. No runner would choose the red pill. NO ONE. Because achieving goals is just a way of reminding you of your primary relationship with running. They remind you of when you started. They remind you of all of your firsts. They remind you of how far you’ve come. They remind you of all the amazing experiences you have. But most importantly they remind you that you run to run. In some ways they remind you of how they might serve a purpose, but in many other ways they are irrelevant.

There has to be a way to fall in love with practice. Fall in love with the process. Fall in love with being outside when you could be tucked up in bed. Fall in love with hard workouts and easy workouts and fall in love with the artform of running. Or at the very least, find running that you can fall in love with. Find the magic in it. The magic isn’t in a number on a watch. The magic is in what only you can know about why you started and why you kept going.

If you can fall in love with practice, you will never need motivation and you will never leave running behind. There’s magic in that.

It’s time to find out who you are and who you could be

Zoey · July 8, 2016 ·

gold-coast-sunset

The first time I ran at the Gold Coast Airport Marathon I was doing the Half Marathon and I was walking back to Surfers and a local said to me the running gods always shine on the Gold Coast. And it stayed with me. And three years later, it’s still true. I’ve had fast runs, slow runs, half marathons and now a marathon, but I’ve never had a bad run.

IMG_2822

(From 2014. That was a pretty good run.)

The morning of the marathon I woke up and I thought I was going to have a bad run. I had one of those ghastly sore throats where it feels like razors every time you swallow. I’d had zero sleep because I watched too much election coverage and felt a bit nauseous from the self-inflicted lack of sleep. And to add insult to injury I was about a day away from my period and my breasts hurt enough walking, let alone running. For probably the first time ever I thought I might have to pull out of the run. It seemed like the planets had aligned to create catastrophic conditions to go out and run a marathon.

pre-marathon

But you never know right? And I had loads of time down at the start line because I was down there for my husband to run the half marathon which starts about an hour and a half beforehand. Plenty of time to wake up, inhale coffee and mentally get ready for a five hour run. After all, I’d eaten all the carbs the night before, it would be a shame to waste them.

carb-loading

Carb loading isn’t the best part about running a marathon, but it’s almost the best part.

When I hit the start line I had a vague goal of running it in under 5 hours. For no other reason than it can help to keep you motivated through the harder parts of the run. I’d never trade the minutes I spend chatting to people on the run, or high fiving kids for fewer minutes on my watch at the end. But it can help to have a goal to keep you focused. My idea for my training this year was to treat the marathons as training runs and run my way into training form through races. And so far, I’ve enjoyed it. My really long runs are marathons and I do more maintenance stuff in between. As I go I’ve been fine tuning it, so this run I wanted to really focus on my nutrition which I’d not paid enough attention to at South West Rocks and I really suffered in the last third of the run because of it.

start-line

I started off way faster than what I intended to run the race for so I could catch up with Carolyn and see how she was going. It was lovely to chat for a bit and then I dropped back so we could both run our own races. And I got to run the rest of my race knowing she was doing really well and got to see her flying on by with about 5km to go too.

I stuck to my plan of one shot blok every fifteen minutes and a GU gel at 14km and 28km and it was great to see how much more my body was capable being properly fuelled for the distance. Although next time I might even add more to that. It was about 30g of carbohydrates every hour but I think I could probably use about 40g. And despite having inhaled about a litre of coffee before I started my stomach was really settled the whole way which let’s face it is like the holy grail of marathons.

So for the most part I got to really enjoy my run. The conditions were stellar. You get to see so much of the water as you are travelling along.

 

It is a long time to be out there with yourself. All the best parts of you and all the worst parts. The part of your brain who believes you can and the part of your brain who thinks you are a fraud. But it teaches you things too. Like patience. I hit a bit of a wall around 17km which is pretty early but my shoes were irritating my ITB a bit, or maybe it was just that start of the section coming up to half way which is a struggle because you still have so far to go. But if you wait it out, you get that second wind. Mine came at 25km. 8km of patience waiting for it to show up, but it did. And then you get to feel invincible for about another 10km.

I’m fond of saying that on a bad day, a run will remind you who you are and on a good day it will remind you who you could be. Marathons always prove me right on that score. I had everything aligned for a crap run, but I showed up and I couldn’t have asked for a better one.

garmin-post-marathon

Never met a finish line I didn’t want to kiss though. I was counting down steps towards the end. It’s what I do interval runs too. It gives me something to focus on, and before you know it, you’ve done the impossible.

42

And now it’s your turn. Maybe it’s time to find out who you are and who you could be.

Why starting over is the worst idea you’ve ever had

Zoey · June 7, 2016 ·

Starting Over

Have you ever wanted to start over?

Yeah, me too. It’s kind of hypnotic isn’t it? You are drawn to it like blank notebooks and new calendars and new year resolutions. If you could just start over, it would be perfect wouldn’t it?

It’s a sweet lie, because nothing is ever perfect. It’s a damaging lie because it tells you if you can’t do it perfect, you might as well not do it at all.

If you find a path without obstacles, it’s probably doesn’t lead anywhere.

What happens when we give ourselves permission to start over, start tomorrow, start on Monday?

You are teaching yourself to quit. You are teaching yourself that you aren’t capable. You are teaching yourself that you can’t keep going. You are also teaching yourself that there are only two options: success or failure. When in fact there are a myriad of choices that you could be making.

Don’t start over, keep going. 

You know what one of the most powerful forces on earth is? it’s not starting over, it’s not beginning, it’s compound interest. Invest in yourself, daily. There are no giant leaps forward, there are just a whole bunch of little decisions that you make every day. You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to keep moving.

tattoo-collage

Do you see the compass? I got that to remind myself that if I’m running, I’m always headed in the right direction.

You don’t choose yourself once and have it be done. It’s a million moments, over and over.

Three things that happen when you don’t start over

The first thing that happens is you start re-wiring your brain to make that same choice in the future, make it easier and make it more quickly.

The second thing that happens is that you are teaching yourself to let go of notions of perfection, and ‘shoulds’, you start focusing on the best choice you can make that day. And sometimes the best choice you can make on that day might be to stay in bed with Tim Tams. But your act of self-nurture is not eroding your sense of self belief.

The third thing that happens is the magic part, really. You start to teach yourself that you are unstoppable and when you start to believe it, amazing things happen.

So you don’t need a do-over, or a blank slate or a fresh start

I like the idea of 10,000 hours. If you keep re-starting those 10,000 hours – where does that leave you? It leaves you with a whole lot more hours and a whole lot less faith in yourself and your ability to keep going.

If you do feel like starting over, why is that?

Really look at why that is. It might be because you don’t actually love what you are doing, or because it’s too much pressure or it’s not realistic. Create whitespace around what you are trying to achieve to take the stress out of it.  I like to think of it as little pieces of time that buffers everything I do, so that when something unexpected happens it doesn’t negatively impact on anything else. As a result I don’t spend the bulk of my time, stressed about time. Give yourself permission to do less, but to keep doing it.

Choose your life, not some idea of what it should be.

If you think of how you want your life to look like, what is that? Examine if you want to do soemthing because you want it, or because it’s an idea of what you should want.

Live the healthiest life you can enjoy, not the healthiest life you can.

You’ve got this. All you have to do is keep going. 

 

 

 

 

 

3 Great Things About Starting and 5 More to Keep You Going

Zoey · May 28, 2016 ·

Everything you need is already inside

There is magic in beginnings. And when people sign up to Learn to Run I get to be a part of the story of people’s beginning, which is a great privilege and an inspiration as well. There’s something pretty amazing in the story you haven’t written yet.

You Decide

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

The cool thing about the beginning is that the only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be. And that thought is more powerful than you probably think it is. Every morning when you get up you get to write your story. And it doesn’t matter what happened yesterday, or last week. It’s a new story and you are writing it.

In the beginning, everything is a personal best

It doesn’t matter if you’re returning from training after a break, or it’s the first time you’ve started. If you haven’t run before, everything is pretty new. And if you have, it feels new. There’s a promise in the beginning and the promise talks to you.

You are always proving how amazing you are

When you do things that you didn’t think you could, you prove to yourself that you can do other things that you didn’t think you could. And it starts to take over other parts of your life as well. All of a sudden, so many more things seem possible.

running-capable

The beginning IS amazing. But what happens after that is even more important.

Motivation will get you started. Habits will keep you going.

You know what giving up looks like, you get to find out what happens if you keep going

The mistake of all or nothing thinking is buying into the idea that success or failure have end-points. But there is no end-point. Your health and fitness are not about finishing a program. It’s your entire life. So it doesn’t matter where you are, your only focus is to keep going. Keep going no matter what.

Fitness is a lifestyle, not an end-point.

Goals give you a framework for progress and a path forward

There might not be an end-point, but there are markers a long the way that are going to give you the drive to keep going, when it doesn’t seem easy and effortless. Goals should be specific, measurable and realistic. Don’t make goals with an idea of your ideal week where everything goes exactly to plan. Make goals based on your average week. You want to feel like you are kicking those goals, not barely struggling to hang on.

To start with work on goals for:

  • Four weeks
  • 2 Months
  • 6 Months
  • 2 Years

And review those goals every four weeks.

And remember: If the plan doesn’t work, change the plan – but don’t change the goal.

Little steps

Celebrate your achievements

Notice those small wins. Celebrate them. Did you do all of your sessions for the week? It’s not something, it’s the beginning of a big something. Don’t downplay it.

Make decisions based on your goals, not how you are feeling

It’s easy to decide not to go out for that early morning training run, if you go by how you are feeling. I usually feel like staying in bed where it’s warm at 5am. But a goal will get me out the door.

Ask yourself: is this decision going to take me closer to my goal, or further away?

Challenge yourself to get out of your own way

Your biggest hurdle is usually yourself. That inner monologue that tells you that you aren’t good enough or strong enough or worthwhile enough. That inner voice will convince you that you are just lazy. That you are never going to be able to run. It will convince you that it’s not who you are.

But you decide.

It’s ok to hear that voice. Everyone has one. But just ignore it and do what you are going to do anyway.

The biggest fear anyone has is that the inner voice was always right about them. But it isn’t. So don’t let it get under your skin like it belongs there. It’ doesn’t. And you’ve got work to do.

never too late

How we learn is key to moving forward

One of the most important things for learning is feedback. And although for most of us we don’t think we need it as much for running and fitness. But it’s exactly where we need it the most. Without there is no context for what we are doing. No way of knowing if we are doing things well or doing things poorly. And in a vacuum it is very easy to get discouraged, focus on the wrong things and miss our opportunities.

And even more than that, taking what we know and teaching others is also really important to being able to internalise our own learning. This is why we have group coaching in Learn to Run, Run Club and Far and Fast, because support and mentorship will change the way you think about yourself.

Find your tribe and you’ll always have a reason to keep going

Find your tribe. Love them hard.

All the best things in life are based on people connecting to one another and connecting to a sense of belonging. Once you find your tribe, all sorts of things that didn’t make sense before start to fall into place.

Your tribe will teach you that the reason you could never fix yourself, is because you were never broken. Your tribe will believe in you, before you believe in yourself. They will show you that you are capable of so much more than you think you are. And on a bad day, the tribe will show you more consideration and understanding than you have ever dared show yourself.

The tribe will take you wherever you want to go.  All you have to do is show up.

Podcast: Episode 3 – All or Nothing Mindset

Zoey · May 11, 2016 ·

Episode 3 (1)

This week we are talking a bit about All or Nothing and the pitfalls when you shape your thinking like that.

I think for people like myself who tend to really struggle with moderation, it’s all about creating a high level of structure for that moderation. And we also talk a lot about how to challenge the sabotage that can lead you to inactivity when you get caught in a bit of an all or nothing spiral.

You can listen and download episodes in Itunes here.

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