I ran the Rock N Roll Nashville Half Marathon a week ago, and I have a lot of thoughts. It was one of the hardest races I’ve run in a long time, and the difficulty had nothing to do with my body. My mind quit on me. It had quit on me before I even…
Category: Life
When Everything is Going Wrong
Two posts ago, I talked about how I evaluate my writing practice/journey/whatever you want to call it. I use a few different metrics to determine if I’m growing as a writer, satisfied with my growth trend, or feel like I’m floundering in some way or another. In a perfect world, I would always “pass” my…
Self-Evaluation for Writers
If you want to progress, if you’re interested in seeing where your potential can take you, and if you want to build a successful writing practice, then sooner or later you’re going to need to perform some self-evaluation. No, I don’t mean giving yourself a pass or fail grade on the quality of your writing….
Not Everything is Pertinent
I’m starting a new training block in the gym today. For the past two years, all of my strength training has been geared specifically to support my running. I was careful not to overdo it volume-wise because I needed to save the bulk of my energy for running, and I needed to make sure I…
Be Kind to Yourself
I had a great lesson with one of my riding students today. I don’t know that she would call it great; she was having a rough ride with her horse. But she rode well and made several improvements, and I sent her home with some homework that I hope she follows through with. I told…
Find Freedom in Goal Chasing
Some is better than none. Some is better than none. I kept repeating that to myself this morning as I dragged myself out of bed at 5am, fully aware that I was too tired, too grumpy, too disorganized, and too unmotivated to go out and do my ten-mile run with any enthusiasm. I told myself…
Hunt Your Fear
I had a breakthrough on a run yesterday. I went into the workout terrified that I wouldn’t be able to complete it; that all the times I’d completed it before had just been a fluke; and that I was too weak/tired/etc. to be able to do it that day. But through the chaos, I girded…
Celebrate Every Win
There’s something about checking items off a to-do list that gives me a little dopamine hit. Even if it’s the simplest task on the list, I still feel a sense of accomplishment, and it gives me a sometimes desperately needed boost of confidence that helps me keep plugging away at the rest of the list….
Actively Prevent Burnout
I ran a marathon on Saturday. The training took twenty weeks. The race took less than four hours. And now I’m giving myself seven days to rest. That means no running, no workouts, no structured training of any kind. And as much as I love running — I miss it already — and hate being…
How to Ask for Help
There came a time in my life when I became embarrassed to ask for help. I felt like I should be able to do everything for myself, since I was all grown up and supposedly self-sufficient. Well, today I watched my younger brother come into the backyard with a jug of juice to ask one…