Resilience

I once read a book about sports psychology and one thing I took from it is that I needed to work on my resilience and my coachability.  Which essentially means I can be stubborn and dwell on stuff for too long.  So if someone is giving me good advice I needed to work on being open to it and use it to my advantage instead of either coming up with excuses as to why I shouldn't or poking holes in their theories.  This is hard to do in an age when we are bombarded with so much information it's hard to tell the difference between good and bad advice.  But one very good example of advice I should have taken was quite a few years ago my brother went for a run with me.  He never runs anymore, he commutes everywhere on his bike and doesn't want to know anything else about exercise after that, but he went for a run with me and ran circles around me.  He is a natural at all the sports he does just didn't ever have that competitive urge to race.  I on the other hand love the challenge I get from entering races but never had the natural gifts.  I made the comment to him "You are so fast and without even trying, I'm jealous"  He told me well you just aren't trying hard enough you are running like you're on a stroll enjoying the views.  I of course was taken aback at first and thought who is he to tell me I'm not trying hard enough.  But it's true I take my time and thoroughly enjoy my training runs sometimes never feeling like I'm breathing very hard.  I never pushed myself unless someone else was around i.e. at races.  But if I know I can run faster why don't I and would that make me even faster if I worked at that.  I find myself not pushing it on training runs when I should and remember this conversation.  So while I need to work on this at least I recognize it and am trying to make a conscious effort to make changes.  I just hate making things too complicated like on x, y, z days I'll do a tempo run on other days I'll do.... I just like to go and run and the most I usually do is know how many miles I need to build up to.  But if I can just concentrate on some true hard effort days I think that would be progress.

Resilience, or lack of, is when I'm passed by a runner and I automatically get down on myself and think well that's the last I'll see of them and sometimes even feel myself let up in my stride a little!!!  But if I'm on a bike I think who do they think they are, and spend the rest of the race trying to catch ok.  He wails briefly because, yes, it hurt like hell!  But then after a quick hug from me and a wipe of his tears he is off again as if nothing ever happened.  He only gets upset if I try to slow him down by putting ice on it.  I remind myself we all go through this and as adults we can sulk in the corner or dust ourselves off and try again no matter how many times we've failed.  The nice thing about sports also is that we can look at issues like this in our athletic endeavors and approach them in a non threatening way but sometimes make the connection as to how these lessons would also benefit us greatly in our every day lives.

from this.....

them.  I need to quit letting myself give up in the sports I know I'm not good at.  Lately also I've learned a thing or two about resilience from my 1 year old son!!  He is such a dare devil and always on the go but you know it takes a while to master this whole walking, running, climbing thing.  So that means his little feet get ahead of himself sometimes and he finds his head making contact with the floor before his feet.  When witnessing this my heart goes into my throat and the only thing keeping me from crying or having a heart attack is knowing that I need to show my son that everything is

to this in a matter of seconds...

So for the next couple of months I want to make an effort to work on these two things.  It's been a long time coming but watching my son grow up has really brought this to light for me.  Not really sure why.  But he amazes me every day and makes me want to be a better person in every way possible!

Happy Training!