Things that make you go ‘hurrumph’…

Actually it was a brief hiccup and now my head is in gear, all is good, but just a short while ago I had a griping feeling of disappointment…

I’d just done my last run of week 7, following the Couch to 5K App. It was my 3rd run of a solid 25 minutes in the space of 5 days. That’s TWENTY FIVE minutes of non stop, (for me) tough, physical activity…

Except that today I failed and ONLY did 22.5 minutes of what felt like painfully slow and heavy steps. And as for 5K, well I scraped in at 3.75…

On the way up the hill that my running route takes me, the negative, nagging voice in my brain, which I call ‘the Script’ was trying to tell me it was impossible to achieve. My schizophrenic alternative and positive voice, tried to focus my head on other things. But it seemed that time was my enemy on the way back down the hill – and that last 2.5 minutes just seemed too unbearably long.

I guess it’s the ‘wall’ that runners are warned about and I hit it straight on. It’s something that the pesky ‘Script’ knows and loves only too well…

Dispirited and only just capable of walking, I reached home and was barely able to lift and move my legs to do the stretches necessary to protect against muscle strain.

And as I sat down, feeling defeated, to write this post, I was literally dripping with sweat and my face burning red… “This is too much” I thought…

But gradually my disappointment dissipated to reason… Instead it was time to analyse why that run was tougher. Was it time of day, or my diet, or ??? Maybe I need to go back to an earlier week and build back up again..?

So it was time to make a choice and so I chose to focus on what I can control. I also decided to choose success over failure: I’m giving myself credit for what I’ve achieved in 7 weeks off the couch and on the road. Was it a failure that I ran for nearly 4 kilometres, my wheezy asthmatic lungs have eased and I’m doing something I wouldn’t have believed possible a few months ago? Of course not! Then I realised that in the past five days I have run for 72.5 minutes in total… That is HUGE!!!

And despite the challenges, this is something I’m really committed to mastering. So along with the physical analysis I’m going to work on my mindset, because whilst my body has to train for this unexpected development in my life, then my brain really has to, too. I’m a coach that wanted to get off the couch, dammit, so it’s time to coach myself through the next steps!

And ultimately, success is not always run in a straight line. It has hiccups and hurrumphs, but why on earth should I let a 2.5 minute slip stop me from being a runner? Nope, I’m WAY too stubborn for that!!!

And at the end of the day, whilst this is all very much a first world problem, all I REALLY wanted was an excuse to post a cute, hurrumphing squirrel picture, just well, because I can… 😉

So… I will choose laughter and persistence and squirrels any time over hurrumphs!

Yours stubbornly,

Sandra x

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