Lessons from the Dog & Trail

Lessons from the Dog & Trail

If there’s a downpour, go splash in the puddles.

If there is snow/rain mixture at the end of March, well, go run anyway.

This is after a short trail run by our house, during a few days of non-stop rain.

 

Basically, make the most of bad weather.  To Pacer, it makes no difference if it a sunny and warm day, or cloudy and rainy day.  She is going to make the most of it either way.  (And, as the saying goes, “there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing”).

Admittedly, I am not the best at following through with this lesson off the trail.  If “bad weather” arises in my life, I don’t always handle it well.  In fact, I sometimes just add to the downpour with negative self talk.  As my boyfriend somewhat painfully told me the other day (and yes, later I was happy he helped bring this to my attention) I am the first to bring myself down.

Telling myself I’m too slow to keep up with the group in a training run certainly isn’t going to win me any races.

Telling myself I’m incapable, that I didn’t learn anything useful in college, or that I’m just not good enough is definitely not going to help me find my passion and create a career on it.

Just like I can’t control the weather, and Mother Nature has ignored my pleas for warmer weather, I can’t control every factor in my life.  However, I can control my attitude and my responses to any unwanted situations.

 It’s often a matter of: Stop, Think, and Act.  (I tried to explain this to my kids at the YMCA yesterday and referred to “Stop, Drop, and Roll”…we ended up talking about fires for 10 minutes). 

[Stop is a reminder to not react to a problem.  We need to take a minute (or a day) to THINK about how we can best respond and the possible outcomes.  It is when people skip these steps and just react that things really go askew.  We have a brain, so we need to use it!  After taking the time to think, then we can act/respond in the appropriate manner that is most in harmony with ourselves.]

Anyway, it is often those rainy days that make the sunny ones all the brighter.

Here’s to running/playing in the rain,

Rach

Resolutions: February

Resolutions: February

We have just entered into the 3^rd month of the year.  That means, if you have a New Year’s Resolution, you should have been working on it for 2 months now…right?

Maybe not so much…

I myself cannot successful pick one thing to improve on and just go from there.  Now, I do have a goal setting chart that I will talk about another time that helps break goals down, but now I’ll simply focus on how I am currently focusing on my resolutions, all in part to help make me a better and healthier person.

In Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, she created a resolution chart each month with several resolutions to focus on each month.  (Check out her site here: http://www.happiness-project.com/  for some great tips and tools).  At the year’s onset, I figured I would just take her charts, post them on the fridge, and go from there.

Again, this was beyond me. 

She had a ton of great resolutions to work on the for the month of February, but I encountered 2 problems for myself: 1) there were too many for me to manage, and 2) while there is no doubt I needed to work on some of her resolutions, they just didn’t quite hit home enough.  However, I did take on the chart idea...Gretchen was right, that little check mark can be amazingly satisfying!

So instead of throw up my hands and call myself helpless, what did I do?   I broke it down, into 2.  One more personal, and another running related.

My first February resolution was to: Use the Foam Roller Every day.

Every day sounds like a lot, but I needed it to become a habit as my mileage increased and, if I only said a few times a week, I’d end up skipping a lot of the days when I really needed it for being too tired…not an excuse!

And, while I probably didn’t use the foam roller as long as I needed to every day, I still followed through…for all 28 days of February.  Hopefully long enough where I’ll carry it through with me into March.

February Resolution Two: To Do the Jillian Michael’s Exercises in “Unlimited”.

This one I didn’t do quite so great at.  It took quite a bit more time and thought than the foam roller.

  I did the (mental/journal) exercises about twice a week for 15-20 minutes.  I got through the first two sections: Imagine and Believe.  I needed to do the groundwork laid out for me in the chapters, to look back and see when my negative behaviors were rooted, to fully move on and become all the I can.  The time was worth it, and I plan to finish it in the next week.  The last section is: Achieve , and I am excited to start!

 

What’s up next in March!?

8+ Hours of Sleep EVERY NIGHT (I don’t think I even have to explain to you all how difficult that one will believe, but I owe it to myself to try)

Update my blog once to twice a week (I needed an easier goal to keep up my confidence!)

Happy Resolutions!