3 Takeaways From My Half-Marathon

For those of you who follow us on Instagram, you may or may not have stumbled across a few ‘Post Run Thoughts With D’ as I was training for my most recent half-marathon. I wanted to notify you that I survived and also hit a personal best time of 1 hour 52 mins! My first ever half-marathon was in 2017 which I finished in 2 hours 1 min. So I am pretty stoked about my improvement. I wanted to share 3 takeaways that I learned from my half-marathon…they may not be what you think.

Accountability

I’ll speak for myself on this one…but I know a lot of people who struggled with their health & fitness when COVID hit. I went from training 5x/week to not having access to a gym. Despite all of the great resources available for virtual training, working out in front of a computer screen was just not for me. I struggled with being consistent. I strength trained here and there and occasionally went out for a run but I could never get on track. 

It wasn’t until I decided I needed some accountability that things started to shift. Getting a coach was the best decision I made. Shoutout to my guy Chris Herbs over at Strive Running for guiding me towards getting ready for this run. His knowledge, programming, and most importantly accountability was a big part in helping me to succeed.

What I learned from this experience is that it’s ok to ask for help and it's ok to reach out to others to hold you accountable. No matter what level of experience you are at, everyone can use a coach to guide them. 

If you don’t have the means to get a coach. Tell your loved ones, share it on social media, or write it down somewhere you can see daily. This accountability to yourself and others will help you on the hard days. And trust me when I say, there will be HARD DAYS.

Commitment

“Commit to the plan even when it isn’t fruitful” One of my good friends and mentors Will Hogendoorn shared this quote with me one day and it really stuck.

In today’s social media driven world all we tend to see is the end product of someone celebrating a success. This makes us think they hold some kind of superpower that we don’t have. When in reality, this person has committed weeks, months, or even years working towards that goal. 

For my run, I committed to 4 months of training and let me tell you that there were many times that the plan was not fruitful. There were mornings where I didn’t want to get up at 5:30am to get my run in before working on building The Movement. There were some Saturdays where I would curse my coach's name because he programmed me a 10 mile run when all I wanted to do was chill. This happens to everyone. But I did it. I showed up and did something hard when I didn’t feel like doing it. There is something to be said about doing hard things when we don’t want to. It builds confidence, it gives us a bit of an edge, and it makes those days we feel good so much better. 

Developing accountability and committing to the plan were huge steps in allowing for me to be successful in my run. However, no matter how much accountability or commitment I had, my sub 2hr half-marathon would not have been possible without trust.

Trust

Now, let me begin by saying I know how cliche it is for me to tell you to ‘trust the process’ but that's exactly what I am going to do. Hear me out.

Without having trust that my coach was going to hold me accountable, without the trust in the plan that was laid out, and without the trust in myself that I could do this despite the challenges I faced, I would not have finished the way I did.

Trust is earned and it is something that takes time. It took me a few weeks to trust that working with Chris was the right decision. It took at least a month for me to trust that the program I had in place was right for me. It has taken me many years to build up the trust with myself to know that I can still accomplish things despite them being challenging.

My takeaway here is that you can have all the accountability in the world, you can have the best plan that you’re committed to crushing, but if you don’t have trust in those areas, it's going to be hard for you to accomplish the outcome you’re looking for.

I'll stop talking now

I’ll wrap things up by saying this. If you’ve been thinking about trying something new that seems extremely uncomfortable, you’ll know that feeling you get on the inside when you think about it. Go do it, explore, learn about yourself, do something hard…

I promise you that it’ll be worth it.