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Some ideas insist on becoming longer than a paragraph.
How to turn a shitty day into something good
This week started bad. Loads of worrying, no proper sleep for a couple of days, and some kind of bug physically. In short, I've been far below 100%. Thursday, I got home from work. Tired. I went for a walk instead of a run. I decided that my body might do good with a short break from running, but I still need the movement. Got back to shower, and still tired. Grumpy. Moody. Feeling sorry for myself. In the shower, I thought about the mood, and how it'd bothered me for almost a week. Noticed it. And decided to let go of the bad juju. Stop it. I had enough. Sometimes that works. Just getting fed up. Sometimes I need to have those days or weeks where I'm moody and in a rut. It's a signal for something else, or just the state I'm in. I know that others have these periods as well. And I've spoken to a lot of people who are stuck in a rut they don't want to be in anymore without knowing what to do about it. I've developed and stolen some ideas on that. Shifting attention from the negative and bothering to things I want to focus on, with the goal being to get out of and away from the rut. These are some of them. Steal them with pride. → Set a deadline According to Parkinson's Law, things take as much time and space as they're given. Setting a deadline for a mood or a rut makes it possible for me to limit that time. What I've seen in people when speaking about getting out of a rut is that they allow themselves to be in the rut for an indefinite amount of time. They don't really have a plan to get out, an exit strategy or even a goal post in time for when they're going to be out of it. → A word of caution Just a word of caution on this, as it's a trap I've fallen into myself: No feeling or mood is bad. They're all signals and part of living. Allow yourself to feel them. Be in them. Just don't get stuck. This method, of putting a deadline to states of being, is something I've been practicing for years. I'm still testing it, with varying results. → Behaviour first One of my current big role models is David Goggins. He's a former Navy Seal and current ultra runner and smoke jumper. He's been known to go head first into things he hate. He hates running, that's why he does it. He starts every day with running, because it's the worst thing he can think of doing. What he, and many others, does is behave in a way and then shape the reality around that behaviour. Behaving in a way as if what they're doing isn't uncomfortable until it isn't. I've done this myself a number of times and found it immensely powerful. For me, it's not about smiling until I feel happy or doing power poses. Most often, it's about making a call, sending an e-mail or just getting to work. Especially when I'm in a rut. That's when I fake it, go behaviour first, and let the feeling of doing the right thing to get me to where I want to be find me.
I ran a 24 hour marathon – this is what I learned
Last Friday, I left work at 4 pm. I went to the grocery store to pick up a bunch of cookies, chips, some fruit and light beers. The cashier looked at me like she was wishing me a happy party. I got home, changed into my running clothes and went out for a 2 mile run. Then I proceeded to run a little more than 1 mile every hour on the hour up until 4 pm on the Saturday. (doubled the last run because my knee was acting up when rested for 45 mins). When finishing the last run, I’d run my first marathon. It’s been a goal of mine for the past year to be able to run long distance again, and now I am. I want to talk about a couple of reflections I had from this experience. → The world doesn’t care Have you ever walked around on your birthday only to be annoyed or surprised that you don’t get any special treatment from strangers who don’t know it’s your birthday? This experience was very much like that. A majority of my loop was on two of the busier streets in Malmö. Throughout the evening and night, I ran past the same 2 bars every hour. None of the people sitting in the outdoor seats recognised me running, even though I ran past some of them 4 or 5 times. Not only that, the world just keeps going when we don’t look. I saw ambulances go places with the lights on, people getting both to and from the club, parents walking their kids in strollers almost every hour of the day. It was like peeking a play I knew was going on, but hadn’t had the chance to see yet. None of them stopped for me to run my marathon. They simply didn’t care about another running dashing past them. Maybe they’d cared a little if they knew what I was doing, but probably not. I know I wouldn’t have. The point is this: The world doesn’t care about you. It’s busy tending to itself. Go do stuff anyways. Not for them, but for yourself. At first I was annoyed at people being in my way, then I started relishing it. Finding the joy in having my own secret. I was in on running this crazy race, they weren’t. → In movement I heal I’ve had this as a mantra to keep working out every day. I feel like I’m getting stronger and better with every session. Even when I’m dead tired or sore everywhere, i get out for a short easy run. Because I genuinely think it heals my aches. I found another dimension to this. I’ve had all the mental benefits from exercising before. It’s why I started running heavily again, to process heavy feelings. The past couple of weeks and months have all contained challenges for myself and people close to me. These runs were, as I’ve discovered most runs are for me, mentally cleansing. They let my mind rest and my body take over the load, stress and pressure. Let me heal for a bit. It’s been said so many times that it feels like a cliché at this point. But these runs were mentally freeing, and really good for my mental health. → There’s no such thing as running a marathon without getting tired Seth Godin has written a book called “What to do when it’s your turn (and it’s always your turn)”. It’s one of the most impactful books I’ve read. In it, he’s written an essay on running marathons, and more specifically about the fact that there’s no such thing as running a marathon without getting tired. The difference between those completing a marathon and those who don’t is that those who do knows where to put their tired. That’s a profound insight to me, because it’s exactly what I had to learn running this marathon. Where to put my tired. I solved it by compartmentalising visually. I put my tired in a box and stowed it out of sight in my mind. Then it was gone. That’s the way to do other hard things as well. There’s no way of building a business without hard work. You just have to find a place for your tired.
Develop your grit to reach success
Grit has proven one of the most important skills and traits in predicting success. That is, if you want to see who’s going to become successful, look for grit. Grit is what keeps you going when inspiration, motivation and sometimes even reason goes out the window. I’ve practiced grit over the past 6-7 years. More or less intentionally, I’ve tried to find ways to keep myself going when I don’t feel like it. It’s a big part of why I’ve developed the way I have in those years. Especially now, where I’ve set up a goal to become an ultra runner, I know that the practice is going to pay off. I’ve already felt it. I don’t want to exercise every day, despite that being my plan. But waking up at 4:30 on a windy/rainy/snowy Sunday morning, I don’t always want to go for a run. But I do it either way.