Things are looking up

The past two weeks have kept me off the road. Out of town work, inclement weather and to be honest, just plain laziness have kept me from being consistent in my training. There is no excuse; but the big challenge for me was getting started again. I guess that's one of the things that exists when the payoff from effort is slow in coming. The only way that I can get time off my pace and burn off the beer tire is to keep working at it day after day. In this world of instant gratification, not to be confused with self gratification, patience is a rare commodity. Perseverance when the payoff does not come right away is sometimes difficult and the abandonment of goals looks less painful when the work toward goals begins to seem like drudgery. The key is to look at the fork in the road and then ask the hard questions..."sure, I'll won't have to go out on the road and freeze, but I still have to answer to myself and the folks who I committed to. I'll even have to quit my blog (how can I write about marathon training when I don't train?)" The same thing applies to life in general; for me at least. There is stuff that I want now (repaired friendships, success in business, a real sense of peace with no un-finished business) and I can say that I have actually hit rock bottom in trying to push some things forward; done really stupid things lately and all it has done is pushed things back rather than forward. I was tired of waiting for a response and I screwed some stuff up when what I really needed to do was empathize with others and understand where they were coming from. In the words of one of my teachers..."Patience, young Jedi".

That situation hit me in the head with a board; so I decided to get back in alignment. I recommitted myself to my path both for training and other aspects of life. I got back to looking at long term goals and finding happiness or at least satisfaction in making small, incremental progress toward goals. [PLEASE NOTE, I BELIEVE THIS WORKS FOR TRAINING AND RELATIONSHIPS, NOT REFORMING HEALTHCARE. INCREMENTALISM IN HEALTHCARE REFORM IS UNACCEPTABLE]. Anyway, the weather broke last night and so I went back out on the road. I set no expectation as to time and just ran comfortably. After doing little if any work for almost 3 weeks, I got on 7.7 miles in 69 (my favorite number) minutes! Friends also reached out to me last night to see how I'm doing! I guess the thing that I needed to realize is that I set a foundation for success (previous training regimens, consistent reliability with friends) that leaves me little ground to cover to get back to a positive position in life. Work is still ahead of me (I have to burn off 1 minute per mile, keep being a mensch (one thing that will take concerted effort, the other that comes naturally)) and all will work out positively! The new shoes helped, too! 25 miles this weekend. I'll report on Monday! I'm moving to a new place in Monday, too!