Mental Strength

Good morning All,

It's been 8 months since the last post on this blog, which is probably about 6 months longer than it should have been. No worries, it's back. I promised myself I'd start writing more at the beginning of the year, and it only took 38 days to actually start writing this year! So here goes nothing...

As you can probably tell by the title of this post, I want to take some time, and a few paragraphs, to write about mental strength, and how that helps me run! Running is really just you against you, so what better way to test your physical endurance and more importantly your mental strength?

If you've read any of the previous posts on this blog, you probably know that mental strength is something that hasn't always been something that I've been known for. I'm much better than when I started this blog. On to the topic at hand!

I set out to run my first 5K in September of 2016. It was a race for the kids at St. Jude, so I figured that was motivation enough. Wrong. Training kind of happened, and so did the race. It was awful, and caused me to have some significant pain in my knee and foot, which put me on the sidelines for a few months.

Fast forward a few months (actually to around the last time this blog was updated) - I'm about two months into a new job, with a work team (hell, I may as well call them a work family) that is always pushing me to be the best person I can be. Because of this, they kicked around the idea of running another 5K around the Fourth of July. No big deal right, but I knew that it would be tougher than I thought.

As I started training this time around I noticed that the running was easier than before. Don't get me wrong, it was still tough, but nowhere near as difficult as the first race. I hadn't done any training to get physically stronger, so I could only attribute this newfound endurance to continued running and this newfound mental strength. Having a strong-ish mind really does help with running. After a certain distance your body wants to stop over and over and over, but you have to keep willing yourself on.

As the distances got easier, more 5Ks were run, and even a couple of 4 milers. Crazy, right? The next logical step was to run a 10K. It just so happened that the first one I ran also benefited the kids at St. Jude. The race wasn't my fastest time, but it felt good to get out there and prove to myself that I could run it. At mile 3, 4 and 5 I wanted to stop. My knee injury was back, and it wasn't making the run easy. My mind kept saying "you trained 7 months for this race, and raised over $500 for these kids, if you stop how will that look?" Thanks, brain! I ran the whole race without stopping.

I'm not a professional runner. I run to help lose weight and stay active. While my mile times are nothing to write home about, even to this day, I'm still able to get out and run longer distances than I ever thought possible. That Fourth of July 5K was my first race of 2017, which I ran in a time of 41 minutes. I just ran a 5K in January and my time was 33 minutes. Still slower than I'd like, but if 8 minutes off your time in 7 months isn't progress, I don't know what is.

This year I'm running  a half marathon. I don't know when I'll try and run one, but that's my goal, and I'm sticking to it!