Life Lessons

In September 2016, I attempted my first half marathon which unfortunately I wasn’t able to complete.  After the race I found myself struggling to come terms with what had happened.  Not simply the fact that I wasn’t able to achieve the goal I set for myself but also the loss of someone I had considered to be a close friend.  I was hurting not only physically but also mentally and emotionally.  I was discouraged because I wasn’t able to finish the race.  I wanted it.  I had worked hard and trained for months to prepare for it.  But in the end, I still came up short of my goal even though it was the farthest distant I had ever run before and it hurt like hell not being able to cross the finish line and bring home my shiny finisher’s medal. When combined with some other things that transpired afterward, well I found myself going to a dark place. It was a rough weekend, but I’ve never regretted doing it. 

The race was at Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, NC which made for a LONG drive home the day after. One of the greatest advantages to long drives, especially when I’m alone in the car is that it provides me with an ample amount time to think things over.  Here are some of the “Life Lessons” I discovered as a result of what initially felt like a complete failure: 

Life Lesson 1: Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you prepare; life still throws you a curve ball. And that’s ok.

  

I trained for months to prepare for the Marine Corps ½ at Camp Lejeune.  I worked hard with my running coach so I could be as prepared as possible. Over the course of those four months, I had more than a few setbacks, but I didn’t let them stop me.  Sometimes I pushed through them because I could. Other times I had to take time off to recover which was a lot harder than simply pushing through the pain.  

One of the truly amazing things I’ve learned was that when life throws you curveballs you can’t be afraid to swing.  Sure, sometimes you’ll miss. You may even strike out a few times. But as long as you keep going, and learn from the experience, eventually you’re going to knock the ball out of the park for an amazing and unexpected homerun.

Life Lesson 2: It’s not about a training harder, it’s about training smarter.

I used to think that I wasn’t pushing myself hard enough and that’s why I wasn’t improving.  The reality is I was constantly pushing myself too hard, too fast. The result was I either ended up getting injured or was constantly recovering from an injury.  That was especially true when I was younger and a large part of the reason I ended having to have lateral reconstruction surgery on both ankles to fix torn ligaments. I lived with severe chronic pain in my right ankle through most of my young adulthood.  On a good day, the pain was tolerable but I had to give up on running because neither ankle could handle it.  And then something amazing happened ... I found a doctor who actually listened and fixed it in 2012.  

In 2013, I decided to start getting back into a more active lifestyle which included running and the chance to challenge myself physically again.  But it wasn’t until I started working with the Balanced Running group that I understood that sucking it up and pushing through the pain wasn’t always the best choice. I was fortunate enough to work with an amazing cadre of coaches who taught me how to recognize the difference between discomfort and pain.  

The same principle applies to life in general.  Most people are familiar with old adage, “Work smarter, 

When you work smarter you start to see the results. You still have to put in the work, and often times it requires hard work to get you where you want to be in life. But working smarter is realizing when you find yourself getting stuck that you need to be willing approach the problems from a different angle. 

One of the greatest lessons I learned from my eighth grade English was, “Practice doesn’t make perfect; perfect practicemakes perfect.” 

Life Lesson 3: “There is no growth in the comfort zone and no comfort in the growth zone.”

In December 2014, I had the opportunity to attend Certified Peer Specialist training where I first encountered this quote. In other words, if you want to improve you have to be willing to push yourself.  Yes, it’s hard, but if it were easy would it really be worth doing? Life is about learning to push yourself outside of your comfort zone and working to achieve goals that seem completely impossible.  If you had asked me if I wanted to a 5k a few years ago I would have looked at you cross-eyed and told you no way. At the time 3.1 miles seemed like an impossible distance to cover.  But when I attempted the Marine Corps ½ Marathon in September 2016, I completed 10.95 miles. Yes, I fell short of my goal, but I still covered more distance than I EVER had before and that’s still pretty damn awesome.

 The last couple years I’ve really been working on pushing myself outside of my comfort zone.  It’s scary and at times really painful but I don’t regret it.  Because even when I got hurt, I learned something and I know I’m stronger for it.

Life Lesson 4: It’s ok to feel the pain and disappointment when you fall short of your goals.

I said this in the beginning, when I failed to cross the finish line when I first attempted a ½ Marathon it left me in a dark place.  It felt like I had disappointed a lot of people I care about.  I was disappointed in myself.  I started second guessing everything I did and felt like a complete and total failure.  I was hurting both physically and mentally.  And honestly the physical pain made the mental pain so much worse.  I know there are a lot people who won’t understand this, but I don’t keep any of the t-shirts from the races I haven’t completed.  Yes, the shirt from that race was for all 3 distances offered (5k, 10k and the ½ Marathon) and I more than completed the first 2 distances but I fell short of the of my goal and never crossed the finish line.  Coming up short, not earning the stupid finisher’s medal from the race hurt. Even now, roughly two and a half years later it still stings.  Disappointment doesn’t just go away.  I wish it did, but it doesn’t.  But here’s the key thing to remember: It’s ok to feel the pain but you have to get through it and not get stuck there.  I’m not in the same dark place I was.  It took a few days to find a through the feelings I was experiencing, but I got there. In large part because I reached out to my running coach and with their help I was able to use what happened as a learning experience and go from there.  

It’s easy to allow myself to get trapped in a viscous cycle of self-doubt and self-loathing.  But what I realized after the race was not only is ok to feel what I was feeling, it’s important to allow myself to feel the pain instead of trying to push it away and ignore it.  And that’s exactly what I did.  I felt it and honored what I felt.  I didn’t brush it off or chide myself for feeling the pain and disappointment I was experiencing.  And as I as drove home the following day, I slowly started to feel better because I had allowed myself to actually feel what I was feeling instead of ignoring the difficult emotions and trying to hide from them. As a result, they no longer held any power over me.

  

Life Lesson 5: Setbacks are going to happen, but they can be overcome if you learn from the experience.

I attempted my first 5k in 2013 but I wasn’t able to complete it.  I had trained for it and thought I was ready.  But when the day of the race came I got a little over a mile and half into it before I had to bow out because my stupid ankle was hurting too much to continue.  I could have given up on running but instead I kept working at it. In 2014, I set a goal for myself to complete at least one 5k a month.  I was well on my way to not only achieving my goal for the year but surpassing it. At least until the last night at Dragon Con that year when I fell outside the Sheraton.  Still don’t remember how it happened, but I sprained my “good” ankle and got a concussion as a result.  Before the Con, I had registered for a 15k and decided to attempt it but quickly discovered that running on a sprained ankle with a concussion is NOT a good idea. It was the second time I had to bow out of a race, and I hated it.  As I hobbled my way back to the start/finish line to turn in my bib to the timing tent, I was overwhelmed by the bitter sting of disappointment.  A few weeks later I had another 5k, which I was able to finish but I was in so much pain by the end I realized it would be my last race of the year.  I went back to the doctor who decided it was time to fix it and a few weeks later I had surgery on my left ankle.  The recovery was much more difficult to endure because I had gotten used to being active.  As a result, I didn’t allow it the time to heal properly and still paying the price for that decision today.  

The Suck it up, Buttercupand No pain, no gainmentality I learned growing up are fine in theory, but in the long run they usually cause more harm than good.  When I was younger I pushed past my limits on a regular basis. I played through the pain and would push myself until I literally could not go any further.  But I’ve since learned that pain isn’t weakness leaving the body, it’s a signal from your body telling you to back off.  There is a difference between discomfort and pain. Discomfort is what you push through and see results.  But when you push through the pain you end up injured and actually set back your performance even further.