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