Life's A Marathon, Not A Race: Part 1

There are nine days left until my first marathon in Honolulu, Hawaii. I remember the first time I heard about this marathon three years ago while I was living on Oahu. I told myself then that I was going to run it one day. My plane leaves on Thursday and, literally, the only thing I can think of is this trip. I’ve been training for months now and there are many lessons that I’ve learned that I find are not only applicable to running, but also to life in general. They are reoccurring themes that have consistently popped up during my preparation and I wanted to share some of the top lessons.

Patience is a virtue. Yes, we’ve all heard this before. But time and time again, the effects of impatience are directly felt if a runner doesn’t heed this advice. When running long distance, it’s advised to warm up first – meaning start off slower than your ideal pace. This allows your legs and body to warm up and helps to find your pace. If you start out too fast or speed up too soon, you may tire out sooner than later and not have the energy to finish the run strong.

For example, in my last 10k, instead of taking my full warm up, my legs were feeling like they wanted to take off and go faster, so I cut the warm up short and sped up for the next interval and then once again after that. Bad idea. The first mile after speeding up felt ok, but then I started to get a bit nauseous from going too fast too soon and had to slow down to a walk for a few minutes. Then I had to start from the beginning speed again and increased my speed in the following intervals.

There are many times in my work where I want to plow ahead at 100 mph. I’ve got a great idea, the adrenaline is rushing, and I just want to go go go! However, if other factors are not in place that can help the idea become a reality, I need to tell myself to wait or risk pushing out a product that is less than ideal in terms of quality. This doesn’t give a green light to slowing down on projects, it just means don’t force things to happen if critical factors are working against you.   

When setbacks occur, don’t dwell. Learn your lesson and move on. A few weeks ago, I decided to take up a gig to go to Vegas and cover an event for work. I didn’t have to, but because I wasn’t able to cover it last year and I had heard so many exciting stories I didn’t want to miss out this year. Going, though, meant that I wasn’t going to be able to hit my mile count for the week and the lack of sleep and the long hours could affect my runs for the next week. I went anyway, had a great time, and got a sinus infection. I was out for a week. I was pretty bummed for a couple of days. This was a huge setback for something that I didn’t have to do. I chose to go and now I was suffering the consequences, which were worse than I had anticipated.

I think this happens a lot in real life. What we had anticipated to happen, didn’t really go our way and we’re left feeling frustrated at ourselves. To counteract this, I sat down and wrote out my top three current goals. Then I told myself if something doesn’t support my goals, then it wasn’t a priority. Writing those goals out really helps when it comes to making hard decisions on what’s important and what’s more important. 

Focus. Don’t just go through the motions. While watching an episode of the The Biggest Loser, one of the trainers, Jillian Michaels explained that they could give you the science of losing weight (calories in, calories burned, what to eat, what not to eat, etc.) but it’s when things start to click mentally that weight loss starts to show strong results. She was commenting on a contestant’s (Danny from Season 8) consistent weight loss of double digits each week for seven weeks. And I knew exactly what she meant. I looked at Danny and thought, ‘This is a guy on a mission.’ You can see it in his eyes, his actions, and in everything that he was doing. He was SO focused.

I’ve brought this type of mentality into my past few runs and have definitely felt a difference between running just to run versus bringing a purpose to a run. It not only has an affect on the action at hand, but also how I feel afterwards. I think in the real world, it’s easy to kind of slip into a ‘go through the motions’ type of routine. But it’s when we bring focus or purpose to a goal or project that success seems to come more easily.

These are just a few of the lessons I’ve come across. I look forward to writing more on this topic as race day approaches. Wish me luck and ‘til then, aloha!

-Rae is a blogger for The Daily Vine. Check out her bio to see where her view comes from.