Happy New Year 2015 everyone!
I'm pleased to report that I'm starting 2015 feeling extremely motivated and positive and in a lot better head space than when I last posted.
To give a bit of background, at the beginning of December I was offered the opportunity to step up to a management position at work on a temporary basis, it turned out that this step was actually a gigantic leap into a freezing lake...well ok not quite but at least thats what it felt like at the time. I felt like I'd bitten off more than I could chew and started to feel very disillusioned.
Another area of my life that I felt disillusioned by at the beginning of December was running. Looking back at my 2014 running year, its hard to understand why I felt like this. I ran the London Marathon in April, a goal I'd been working towards for 3 years. To top this off, I ran it in well under my target of 5 hours, coming in at 4 hours, 43 minutes and 34 seconds. That should have been it surely? If I wasn't in love with running by then, then running the London bloody Marathon should have made me fall hook line and sinker. To tell the truth I was in love, but like all good relationships, running and I hit a rocky patch.
I was expecting to recover within a couple of weeks and then be able to run half marathons (I was at least trying to be a little bit realistic) at the drop of a hat. Wrong! I ran about 529.4 miles in 2014, but only 70 of these miles were post marathon. I wasn't in pain as such but my whole body felt like lead, my brain was telling me to stop and my heart wasn't in it. I ran a few races in this time, hoping in vain that my mojo would return. I even said it did a few times in an effort to fool myself.
One positive to come out of this was discovering Pilates. I discovered a new way to exercise, learnt a lot about my body and how this could help me with running. I now take regular classes at The Pilates Pod and is an avenue I'm intending to continue travelling down in 2015. However I was still determined to get back to running.
I've always been a goal orientated person and with hindsight I think having achieved my end goal of running a marathon, I had nothing left to aim for. There wasn't anything left to run towards so I just ambled off (slowly and not very far) into nothing. Cue a little event called Advent Running.
I first learnt of Advent Running through a few runner friends from UKRunChat who were talking a lot about run streaks (where you commit to running for a certain number of days in a row). The aim of Advent Running was to run every day between the 1st and 25th December. With a desire to get back into running and a love of all things festive I decided to sign myself up. On saying this, having not had much success with finding my mojo in other events I did not have high hopes. However I think not having a huge expectation and not putting pressure on myself actually helped.
Having a goal set that wasn't surrounded by times and distances was the best thing that could have happened to my running. I still had something to aim for whilst removing the pressure of 'having' to do a certain distance or time which I had been bound by during marathon training. For the first time I just ran for fun and to keep fit, the reason I started running back in 2012 in the first place. Pretty much from day one my mojo was back and this time I wasn't kidding myself.
As I said before I was finding work quite stressful and having something else to focus my energy on really helped. Whenever I hash tagged runforsanity I wasn't kidding!
Equally as exciting as the return of my mojo was finding a whole new community of runners through the Facebook group (isn't the internet flipping' wonderful sometimes). Seeing people's posts and hearing their stories really inspired me to keep getting out there day after day and really brought back meaning to my running. I love being able to share my passions with people and see them grow, improve and simply just enjoy the experience. It reminded me that at the end of the day, its not all about distance, split times and calories burned...its about just running and also thats its ok to do just that. It felt like an adventure (advent-ture...sorry) again.
If something made me run just over 50 miles in a month compared to 70 miles in 7 months then its got to be doing something right!
I'm so happy to be able to say that it doesn't end there, we all enjoyed Advent Running so much that we're taking in through to January and taking on Jantastic for the next three months. As I logged on to the website today to make sure I'd set my goals I got a tingle of excitement for the upcoming months of achieving fitness goals and watching my fellow Advent Runners do the same.
Running is for life, not just for Christmas...thank you my fellow Advent Runners and new buddies for reminding me of this. I literally can't wait to start Jantastic, January 5th is the new January 1st.
Holly
x
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