Personal

It’s an old rule of blogging isn’t it? Never apologise for being away because no one cares how little you post. Just write, don’t apologise for not writing.

Anyway, it’s been a minute, or you know the better part of a year or two, give or take. And it’s like coming back to anything it feels bloody awkward and uncoordinated at first. But the only way to get through the bad writing is to keep writing. And even as I write that I feel that it’s very possible this should be an internal, unpublished writing thing – but I can’t help but think everyone is feeling much the same way since 2020 and there is value in occasionally saying things out loud and not just to yourself.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when the SEO optimiser is glaring at you with your waffly post or you are facing having to start something that feels like completely from scratch. You might just shrink back from it a few times.

On the 24th of July I got Covid and I’d thought it would be nasty for a week and then I’d get better, but you know it’s now two months since then and I’m heaps better than I was but I’m not back to normal. It’s been a really beneficial reminder that when you have a certain degree of confidence and competence in a certain area like running because I’ve been doing it for about 10 years now and it gets eroded, the mental game is the hard part. You start to realise how much you relied on that strength and you have to make some serious adjustments to how you approach things now that it’s no longer such a strong point.

I’m doing a DBT course at the moment and one of the things we are working on is radical acceptance. The idea that resistance to pain is what causes suffering, rather than if you just accept things as they really are. Not as you wish them to be, not as you think they should be, but as they really are. There are loads of things I get to practice this on. Like this weekend when I was all set for a lovely weekend of zero responsibilities and one of the kids computers had a major malfunction and I spent over 5 hours trying to fix it. Only to find at the end of all of that I have to take it to the computer shop anyway. Many deep breaths and as much acceptance as I could muster.

I feel like I’ve been in a holding pattern for a long time, not quite ready to accept that the last few years have happened. But they have. And the big part of that, which so far has only existed in my head until this point in time is either you are an athlete or you are a coach/business owner but you don’t get to be both. For a long time I was able to do both (some days better than others) but now I work 20 hours a week outside of my business and you can’t just add 20-30 hours in to your week over the last few years and expect nothing to change. But I have been extremely resistant to that change. Wilfully resistant. Resistant beyond reason.

“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

And yet still, I’m here and I know I feel the most purpose when I hear back from people that what I’ve said is what they needed to hear. People don’t need an inner critic – they’ve got a pre-made one that does that job better than it has any right to do. What they do need is someone to say – I see you. It IS hard. You don’t need to push yourself harder. Sometimes harder isn’t better, it’s just harder. Go chase where your joy is at.

I’ll be taking my own advice. Accepting that I can’t do everything anymore and getting pinpoint accuracy on the things that really matter.

This morning (or last night really, but it starts today) I’d decided to try this productivity tool which is called – MIT (most important task) where they night before you decide what would be the thing you could do tomorrow which would most push the needle in terms of your goals. Which for me is definitely creating. Of all kinds. So here I am writing.

Earlier today I was talking to a friend of mine because her sister and my friend would have had her birthday yesterday, but she died last year so she is forever 39. We talked about how it gets harder the further you get away from it. But also we talked about a lot of other things because that’s what happens when you’ve been friends with someone for 42 years. One of the things I talked with her about was how often barriers to entry stop you doing anything at all. Which you know, I should know a thing or two about being a coach, but sometimes you are late to learn the lesson for yourself.

I was talking about how with the bonus podcast on patreon, it’s really easy to publish because I don’t do any intros or music or editing or artwork. I record it on my voice app on my phone when I’m ten minutes early for the gym or generally procrastinating in the car because it’s cold and I publish and it’s out there. With other things the little barriers can get in the way: like it takes my computer 30 minutes to open garageband to edit the podcast (I know, I’m getting a new computer, I swear), or I have to spend 20 minutes making the visuals for it. Anyway, you get the idea. The actual bones of it is easy, the trappings are hard and time consuming. But I really just need to get to the point where I do things and allow them to be frill free.

It’s an easy trap to fall into when you feel like you are failing on multiple fronts. Failing is too strong a word. Struggling would be more appropriate. Which is okay – new jobs and new study doesn’t have to be easy and it will get better as I get more comfortable with things. But the instinct is very much to hide.

So if you happen to hear a podcast coming up without all the bells and whistles, you’ll know why.

The bones are going to be good for now.

It all started when I watched the Social Dilemma on Netflix. Or, that’s where it seemed it started anyway.

Such a terrifying look at the ways our lives have been shaped by artificial intelligence and algorithms and recognising so many of those addictive patterns in myself. Like why do I carry my phone from room to room? Why am I checking it all the time? What am I looking for? And deeper more worrying questions about children who will have never known the ‘before’ so it’s all just reality to them.

But really, it was before then. That was just the moment that put it into startling high definition.

That tension between what was sharing and what was performance.

And the uncomfortable truth that the vast majority of my social circle is either clients and employees who are also closely held to my heart friends. There is no separation. And there are no private spaces and no unconnected spaces either.

When I was updating the new Mighty Networks community, which is our new community home (yes, it’s off Facebook and the Facebook community group will be archived at the end of this month), I grabbed something I’d written about Operation Move as an introduction to people who were new.

“If you’d like to read more a great place to start is the blog or the podcast. Zoey tries to post regularly, but if she’s busy coaching, they can get a bit neglected at certain times of the year.”

And that hit me like a tonne of bricks, because there was past me giving me so much grace for the fact that I am inconsistent because I am a coach not a content marketer.

I was also desperately not wanting to be that person who just disappears when things aren’t going well with running. But more than that, I didn’t want to be the person who was impacted by not running. I mean obviously I’d feel the effects, but I wanted it to be a positive thing as well. But ultimately sometimes doing the work, is all the work you can handle without also broadcasting the work.

I took all the photos at the gym, at the pool, out on walks. But I just never posted them, and the day would pass and I’d be onto the next day and it just seemed like it was in the past.

Here is the truth of the matter.

Injury is hard.

Social media is hard.

Running a business is hard.

Having a deep crisis of confidence is hard.

Accepting the necessity of outside work is hard.

And all of those things can be true, while still being deeply grateful for those exact things at the same time.

I’ve struggled with what to say. Or if it would even matter if I said it. Even if I said it really well.

And so I’ve done nothing instead.

In that time my relationship with podcasts has taken on a kind of magical quality. Like I would get the repeated message over and over on seemingly really disparate podcasts and ones that I would randomly pick and not normally listen to.

A couple of them told me to have the courage to take a break at the end of the year, get above the tree line for a bit to see what the forest wanted to tell me.

A few more told me I don’t write down my thoughts, I write to find out what my thoughts are.

What would you do if you knew you were going to fail?

That’s the premise of all running coaching. Because you are going to fail in some way at some time. Maybe you don’t hit the intervals, maybe you get injured temporarily, maybe you have to DNF your dream race. There are a million ways to fail and very few things you can point to that demonstrate a success. And if it is a success (like a new PB or finishing that big event) how long does it last – a day a week? Not long enough for it to be permanent. And yet, we find so much love in it anyway. There’s joy in the failures, the successes, the in-between times when you have a kind of not bad – not great run – and you step outside yourself for a minute to reflect and are like ‘holy crap I am a person who runs 8km like it’s nothing, that’s so cool’.

And so the time for doing nothing has passed.

And the time for doing what is worthwhile even if failure is inevitable is at hand.

Doing the work that is worth doing.

“All runners are tough. Everyone has to have a little fire in them, that even in tough times, can’t be turned off.” – Shalane Flanagan

I was walking the other day. One thing you don’t think about when you are used to running: is what do people even do with their hands when they are on a walk. Like, clearly I don’t think about it when I’m walking around doing errands. But on a purposeful walk, what even are they doing?

I have a vague memory of running feeling equally uncoordinated.

Eventually, the walking starts feeling less like an alien inside your body asking you to move, and it just feels unremarkable. Like you’ve never done anything else.

Injury always takes you back to the beginning again, to remind you what the hard parts are, what you have taken for granted, all the things you haven’t thought about because you’ve been on auto-pilot for a long time.

The funny thing about my injuries is that I go long stretches without ever having anything to complain about, but when I do get hit with something it’s usually a few months to sit back and take it all in.

So much of the time, you don’t ask yourself the questions, because you don’t want to know the answers. But you do know the questions. You just cover them with routine and habit and expectations until they suffocate or drown under the weight of repetition.

And that’s what those questions have been doing, drowning over and over. Your brain will ask you in different ways, so they don’t seem like the same question, so they can bubble to the surface. The brain is interesting like that. It can recognise that something is broken. It recognises the broken pattern, but it can’t foresee how to fix it. So it just repeats it over and over, hoping that one day, you might have a breakthrough maybe. But mostly it’s just repetition. Looking for the broken piece of the code that will make it all make sense.

This year, it would be easy to just say it’s 2020. Way too easy.

But it’s not, so for now I’m just sitting there with the questions, trusting that the breakthrough will happen at any time.