“The Best Part Was the Training”

Talk to marathon and half marathon runners and you will often here this phrase. Yes, that’s right – they LOVED training for it. The event itself, well, that might be kind of exciting and incredible as well, but it might not matter as much since you train for months and months and you LOVE doing that. And I suppose that is the first lesson isn’t it. We need to make sure we love the training process. If you are not loving the training, then figure out exactly why you are not and get ready to fix that. I hope these other tips I picked up and learned along the way will help you as well. And of course this goes for whatever goal you are trying to achieve.

Track Your Training

This is one you have probably heard me talk about before. With my classes at CBT Nuggets, I even include trackers for the students to use as they move through the course.  For me, tracking became an obsession, and this obsession proved very motivating. Also, in the specific area of distance running it was very necessary since I had to find the perfect pace at which I would have a chance to complete the actual race.

Find a Training Buddy

I would not have succeeded in this endeavor without a training buddy. Someone to push me, hold me accountable, discuss ideas with, etc. By the way, that is my training buddy pictured above! When we started, I was better at running and really enjoyed it much more than her. As you can see from that finish line shot, that all changed!

Add Fun!

When I would run with my buddy, we would chat. And you know me, I love to chat. When running by myself I would add music. I am so busy, there is often never time to check out some latest album. These solo runs, which I might have really disliked, became fun with music added.

Join a Community

OK, I never joined a runner’s community, but I lurked at a bunch of them. Getting questions answered that were crucial for my success.

Don’t Let Jerks Get You Down

If you are into social media, or in a community of people online, you are going to run into jerks and trolls, it just happens. When people are hiding behind a keyboard, they can become pretty callous and mean. To add a problem, many times someone will sound like a jerk when they are actually not trying to act like that. During my training, someone posted on Twitter in response to one of my training posts that included statistics on a run – “You know you are not running right? You are jogging!” While I thought about getting angry about this, I just blew it off.

Get Excited for the Next Goal!

While there was some amount of “thank God that is over!”, after the race I became very excited about the future and more health goals. This thing had kicked weight loss into overdrive. I lost 14 pounds over the course of training and the race. Not bad. Now I can really up fitness goals of the future…

Thanks for reading, and remember, LOVE your training!