Welcome to Episode #258 of the Own Your Best Life Podcast.
You’re never supposed to wear anything new on race day.
I went to the Berlin marathon expo, bought an Adidas racing singlet, and wore it.
I knew why the rule exists. You don’t want anything chafing and you don’t want your body in something it isn’t used to. But I’d read the materials, it was really light, and I knew the forecast was going to be hot. I wanted something lighter than what I had.
That singlet matters later.
The numbers
Berlin was my second marathon. New York was the first, four hours and nineteen minutes. Berlin came in at 4:11.
There’s a bell at the finish you can ring for a personal best. I didn’t know it was there. I was winding my way around trying to find Jay and figure out how to get out of this massive space, and I saw it. So I got in line and I rang the bell.
It was so cool.
What I actually learned
You can want something and not want what it takes to have that thing.
This is where most people stop, because the advice you get is to go even harder and want the thing harder. That doesn’t work, and you feel even worse.
What I found did work was the opposite. To actually want what it takes, I had to change what it took until it was something I could want.
And then the wanting followed.
In the corral
When you’re in the corral you’re herded in with all these other people. You’re feeling the energy. You’re about to begin.
As I started walking toward the front, toward the starting line, a thought came to my mind from field hockey in high school. It was a phrase printed on the back of our preseason training shirts, so that when you were running behind someone you’d see it the whole time you were suffering.
Pain is temporary. Pride is forever.
I hadn’t thought about that phrase in decades, and then there it was.
What it did was call back a version of myself that is gritty and hungry and primal. Almost like, let me loose and go after the thing.
The pace
When I normally run, the pace is a thing that’s just between me and the ground and my body in that moment. Where I run there’s a lot of open space.
Berlin was packed. To hold a pace I had to time every pass. Move over. Really work for it, consistently and constantly, for four hours plus.
Afterward someone compiled all the stats from the race so you could put in your number and see them. One of mine said I passed over 6,000 people. It sounds insane and it completely tracks to the experience. All I was doing was trying to pass people, and I am not the fastest runner out there at all.
About three quarters of the way in, which is usually a hard part to run, I heard a bit of howling, or a dog barking somewhere in the crowd. And that primal feeling came back. I got excited.
For a couple of miles after that I was in hunting mode. I was literally hunting people down to pass them. Okay, that person, I’ll go pass them. And this person, I’m going to pass them.
I wasn’t racing, though. I don’t know any of them and none of them were competition. They were the terrain. The only thing I was doing was working on my pace.
Because here’s the thought I had very clearly: I have to fight for this pace. The second I relaxed and settled in behind whoever was in front of me, I slowed down. Not a little. Way off my pace.
I didn’t have a pacer or a pacing group. I was finding my own pace among a sea of thousands of people running their own paces on their own journey.
I have wondered since whether fight is the right word, because it can feel like we’re always just struggling with everything. But it’s the word that connected in that moment, because it wasn’t do nothing. It was active work to move forward.
And you can fight for a pace and still not hit it. You can keep trying and not get it. What it does is keep you deciding.
There was no relaxing. There was no checking out. For four hours I was deciding whether I was going to hit that pace.
Which only worked because I had a pace I was locked into. If I’d never set what it was, I’d have had a hard time keeping to it.
The stats said I ran a 2 percent positive split between the first half and the second half. Ideally you want a negative split, because it means you saved a little and pushed the back half. Most people, 80 or 90 percent of the field, also ran positive splits, but much bigger than 2 percent. Holding that pace worked because it was conservative enough that it felt easy at the start, even knowing it wouldn’t stay that way.
It’s such a mind game, because you think you want to go faster. And you can.
Mile thirteen
I had a thought plan for every 10K. Each segment had its own mantra and its own focus.
I think this is the reason I felt so strong and healthy running, because none of it was decided on a whim in the moment.
Our brains serve things up constantly that do not serve us. Whether you’re sitting down to get a block of work done and procrastinating, or you feel scattered all over the place, it’s likely because you never made a plan for what you were going to think about and focus on. The job is deciding in advance what you want to be thinking, instead of taking whatever arrives.
Any time my work goes awry and I’m not focused, it’s because I didn’t decide beforehand what I was coming back to.
And even with the plan, somewhere in mile thirteen, a sneaky thought got in.
I don’t know. This is so hard. I don’t know if I can keep doing this.
And then a sign appeared. I have a secret sign that shows up for me in certain moments. It’s physical, something that actually appears, and it tells me I’m on the right path, or I’ve got this, or come back in. I’m not going to tell you what it is.
Okay. We’re back. We’ve got to get back. We’re back to it.
What’s interesting is that in four hours, that’s the one thought I remember having that was even slightly negative. I’m not saying the others were amazing, like I’d never felt better in my life. They were just real. Push here. Get water. When’s the next fuel. Time this. Check on that. Look over there. The rest of it was actively managing the race.
The promise I made myself
I’d had the same kind of thought during my first training block, for New York. One night before a 16 mile run I said out loud to Jay, I don’t want to run 16 miles tomorrow. And I knew as I was saying it that it wasn’t a helpful thought.
The reason I notice thoughts like that is that I’ve made a promise to myself to be coherent. If I’m going to do a thing, I’m doing it. If I don’t want to do a thing, I don’t do it. Don’t be half in it and then resent it.
So it was a human moment, complaining about a run I’d signed up for. But I was careful with it, because the whole thing was 100 percent a choice. I’m lucky. I’m blessed to be able to run at all, let alone to be trying this.
It’s fine to have the human moment where you don’t want to. Notice it, because it is completely a choice, and you’ll feel so much better.
The same thing applies at work. If you’re thinking I don’t want to be doing this, but you’re doing it anyway, that sneaky half-in-half-out doesn’t serve you. If you’re doing it, you might as well be fully in. I’m doing this tedious thing and I’m going to rock it.
And if you really don’t want to be there, then don’t be there. But you have to be okay with not being there, and you have to be able to defend it.
We get into these strange arrangements where we work with people we don’t like and we complain about them, instead of either not complaining and just dealing with it, or complaining and then doing something so that they aren’t a problem in the same way again.
That’s also why this fit on top of a busy schedule. When you wake up thinking I’m so grateful I get to do this, the difference isn’t small. It’s exponential. It changes how you feel going out, coming back, and getting on with the rest of your very busy life.
Which is why I had moments mid-race of looking up and thinking, remember, this is amazing. They closed this whole city down. Look at these buildings. Look at all these people.
I probably could have done more of that. It’s one of the things I want to do more of next time.
The body
My body felt good. The IT band came back a little. I could feel it starting to turn.
Not today. We are not doing this.
And it stayed away.
There were moments it did hurt, and in those moments what I said to myself was specific. Not you can handle pain. Not you’re going to be okay. It was: you can handle a lot of pain. You’re good at handling pain.
That’s a different sentence from you will make yourself able to handle this.
And I could say it because it was true, and it was true because of evidence. If I hadn’t had that really painful first marathon, I wouldn’t have been confident. If I hadn’t run 18 miles in the rain during training, I’d have thought that if it rains I’m screwed. If I hadn’t done long runs in massive heat, I’d have been frightened of the heat.
We can say these things to ourselves when they’re actually true. We can be okay with a level of pain without it being unending suffering, because we can handle it.
Nothing broke. I ran three and a half miles a few days later as a recovery jog and it felt good.
And that came from decisions made months earlier. I left CrossFit for FS8, which is Pilates and strength and yoga, because I knew I needed more single leg work. I chose three days a week of running on purpose, with low mileage, built around my real life and around a real injury I was trying to rehab and prevent. I wanted to get to the starting line without a big IT band injury, and I wanted to train without one.
Things did come up. Pain showed up in different places. And it all moved away and went away, which I didn’t know was possible, because I’d gotten so used to running with that IT band pain.
The last five kilometers
For the last three miles I was pushing a pace faster than I started at, which was the plan. You give what’s left but you want to get to the edge and not over it.
I was thinking, I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up. That’s the constant battle, figuring out how much more you can give and for how long, because you have to pace yourself all the way to the end.
Then I rounded a corner past these old Berlin buildings and there was a bystander in the crowd holding a beer in a plastic cup. Something dark and amber.
I don’t even drink beer. It doesn’t have the appeal for me that it has for people who spend a hot adventure thinking about the cold beer at the end of it.
But it reminded me that there was an end. That there was a finish. And it brought up images of people celebrating and being happy, because I was fairly sure there’d be beer at the end. There was, and it was all alcohol-free, and I enjoyed it very much.
So the thought I had was: run this in a way you’d be proud of at the end. What do you want to be celebrating? Don’t do something now that you’d regret then, because this is going to end. This pain is going to end.
Understanding that what we’re going through is not permanent is huge. We forget it all the time. When we believe a thing is permanent we slow down, because we can’t picture sustaining it, or we tap out before we actually need to.
You do have to check whether there’s an end in your particular case. In this case there was. It wasn’t imagined and it wasn’t pretend. There was literally an end and I was going to get there.
That gave me a boost of energy.
There’s a concept in behavioral economics from Daniel Kahneman’s work called peak-end theory. People remember the peak of an experience and the end of it. Which is worth knowing if you’re designing experiences, for yourself or for anyone else. An experience can be twice as long and twice as hard, and if it ends well you’ll rate it better than the shorter one that didn’t.
It’s also why people come back and do these things more than once.
And pain is temporary, pride is forever, which I did not connect until now, is the bridge between the two. It’s the same thought. At the start it says this is going to be painful and you’re going to be okay, and more than that you’ll be proud of what got accomplished that day no matter what. At the end, the beer said the same thing from the other side.
It’s one of the ways we remind ourselves that we’re going to be living our future self’s life at some point.
A lot of us are going after hard things. Getting into organizations that are not easy to get into. Getting certified, getting the degree, passing things that are factually and objectively difficult. And doing it on top of being a parent, having a family, friendships, health, work, sometimes several kinds of work at once.
When you’re doing that you have to be able to answer why am I doing this. The answer is that there’s something in it that’s meaningful to you, and that you have what it takes to sustain it.
And when my clients get to the place where they learn the level of patience, the level of grit, the level of uncertainty they can actually handle, there’s a flip side to it. A very primal, gritty, almost animalistic and raw power emerges, and it’s almost completely at odds with the poised, elegant life they have.
I think underneath, we want to reconnect with that part of us.
Part one: I built the plan myself
Here’s a thing nobody tells you. You never run marathon pace for marathon distance in training. So how do you know what your pace should be?
I was confused by this. How am I going to know I can hit these paces if I never do it for that distance? And I didn’t even know what I should be pacing at, because my data was flawed, because the last time I ran I was injured. So what is my real capacity?
I felt like I was in a circular reference. If you know Excel, and I think many of you do, it’s trying to create the thing from the thing.
What that uncertainty created was a need to learn more and fill in the gaps. This is a real question I have. What do people do? And I started realizing there was a way to figure it out. I just hadn’t done the things that would tell me.
So I read. I listened to other coaches. I was amalgamating all of it. And I realized I never had any marathon pace inside my long runs, so I put it in myself for the last several, to attempt it and feel it and find out where to start honing in.
Then there’s the thing I could have done better, and will do differently next time.
I never recalibrated my training plan in the app. It was still calibrated to my last marathon, and I wanted to run faster than that. So for most of the training block I was adjusting the pace manually in my head, never knowing if I was right, feeling like I was winging it.
When I finally made the adjustments, I started hitting my paces with much more accuracy. If I’d done it earlier I think I’d have been faster sooner, and stronger sooner, because I’d have added in the things I needed to add in.
Think about the application at work. A lot of the time we’re operating off an old identity. That’s why I do so much work with people on rebranding and reinvention and spiritual awakening, because it unlocks the part of you that says I’m not a cog in this machine, I’m here to live this big beautiful life, what else is possible.
That’s what I was doing. Trying to break out of, well, that was who I was, and even that wasn’t ideal. So what’s my actual training plan now?
It’s the same question as what are my actual routines. What are my actual habits. What do I need to invest in now and do differently, because I’m a different person than I used to be.
And then there’s the singlet. If you understand the rule, you know what to do to change it, edit it, break it. I knew the rule well enough to know it was going to be fine, and the shirt is literally designed so the airflow moves. Now I know.
So I broke the most repeated rule in marathoning on purpose, and at the same time I was running a plan built on who I used to be without ever questioning it enough to change it.
Achievers over-rotate on the plans we were given. Because overachieving on other people’s expectations feels good. You set the bar, I’ll clear it. You set the bar, I’ll clear it. I will somehow be so perfect that you’ll never find fault with me.
Then we realize that you set this whole thing up and you don’t know everything about me. Then we feel frustrated. Then we start to resent. Then we feel victimized. Then our power leaves us, and our confidence starts to go, and then we stop going after things and start retreating, because we’re afraid of ending up back in the place where we were upset and resentful and not loving our life.
So we have to invert it.
We have every reason to be confident. You’re able to communicate your needs. You’re able to say what will work and what won’t. You’re able to reclaim your time. And if we don’t do it, we can be our own worst enemies.
Achievers often have more reason to be confident than the person next to them, and we don’t use it. We underestimate our abilities and we overachieve, and not because it’s interesting and exciting. We overachieve because we’re afraid of not meeting people’s expectations.
Part two: knowing the price I was willing to pay
The stats said I finished in the top 36 percent of women in my age group. That isn’t fast. I’m not slow either. I’m very proud of this time and I want a better one.
So did I put it all out there? That’s the delicate balance, knowing what you have left to give and how much more you can work. We make that trade constantly. How deep do I go into this conversation. How much more do I put into the studying. How much more can I work on this project before the returns start diminishing.
David Goggins has the 40 percent rule, the idea that most of us are operating at 40 percent of our capacity. He’s run a lot of ultras and has a lot of accolades behind him and works extremely hard at everything. So that idea popped into my head mid-race. What if I’m at 40 percent right now, and it all feels terrible, but I can really go harder?
Part of me does think I could have pushed harder.
And then I think about how my lungs hurt to breathe deeply for days afterward. Taking a deep breath in was painful. My legs hurt. At the finish line, when you stop and try to start walking, I was disoriented and almost stumbling.
Nothing broke, so it was the healthy version. I don’t think I left a ton out there. I think there was still something, but not much.
What it would have taken to run significantly faster is not what I did. I’d have had to run more mileage, earlier. I didn’t. Two months of training. Three days a week of running. Low mileage, when my training plans wanted four. And instead I focused on quality, rest and strength and Pilates the rest of the days.
That’s what got me the result I got.
And here’s the part worth sitting up for. If you were a running coach looking at my numbers you’d say, she’s only running three days a week, okay, easy, we can get her faster, build the mileage up, she’s healthy and strong. That’s a good place to work from.
That’s the whole point. I paced it so there was still more to give.
I don’t know that it would have worked the same in my old brain, where every run was a push and the answer was always more, faster, earlier. People can tell you this all day long. Everyone was saying the same things. It wasn’t until now that I understood what it actually meant to run at these paces and build mileage this way.
Here’s another version of the same lesson. I used to run fasted, meaning I didn’t eat beforehand. This block I ate before every run.
Most of us have food and exercise backwards. We exercise to compensate for eating. I ate too much, go run a lot. Or hurry up and run so I can eat more. The real relationship is that you eat more so you can do the thing.
Which meant that for most of the training block I felt like I was gaining weight. I don’t have a scale so I don’t know. I could feel the running shorts getting tighter, and I let them be that way.
If I need to lose weight later, I know how. I know what to do. Right now I’m ramping up mileage and I need the fuel, so don’t make a silly decision. Just do what you need to do.
Afterward it came back down, exactly as I thought it would.
Ten years ago I don’t know that I could have sustained that. I think I’d have said it’s fine, this is a good time to lose weight, I’m running so much.
Everyone is different. Some people do need to lose weight as they run because it helps them run better. But until you have a healthy relationship with how you see your body, it’s very easy to use movement to punish yourself for a body you don’t like, which creates a relationship with movement that has nothing to do with what your body can do and everything to do with how it looks.
I promise you I’m not immune to that. I know it so well, which is why I speak to it. It is not easy to watch yourself gain weight or get bigger when you’re carrying an image that small is better, small is better.
What I’ve learned to do is let myself be uncomfortable. Let myself work the plan. Let myself do what’s necessary for my body to do what it needs. It doesn’t mean eating unhealthily. My body changes, and I genuinely like the results now. But it took a lot of don’t let yourself think about it, just work the plan.
And if I’d done marathoning in a way where I felt terrible about food, or pushed extra miles because I thought I had to, I wouldn’t be anywhere near wanting to run again.
Instead I did multiple 14 mile plus runs during a two week family trip to British Columbia, while doing the corporate training, and the coaching, and being a mom and a wife. It didn’t blow things up.
Because of that it feels sustainable. It feels doable. It feels like something I can keep working on and optimizing and enjoying.
That’s part of wanting what it takes. What price am I willing to pay, and how do I make it actually work for me, so that I want the thing.
Part three: the wanting follows, because you became someone else
The third part is realizing that the wanting follows, because you let yourself become someone different.
If you hear marathon and think, I don’t want the long run, I don’t want to know what it’s like to fuel, I don’t want to eat carbs, I don’t want to think about getting up, or how long it takes, or shoes, any of it, then I’m not going to have it. I’m not going to run a marathon. And that was me.
Sometimes we think, you know what, I could run the thing without doing any of what it takes. Sure, why not, it’d be an interesting experience. Just to experience it without really experiencing it.
And then we realize that doesn’t work.
So it’s one of two things. Either you actually want something else. Which is partly true for me: I don’t really want the super fast time that would have required all that extra mileage while I was rehabbing an injury and fitting it around everything else and trying to injury-proof myself. That would have felt good in the short term, go bust yourself, go after the fast time. And then I’d have blown up and thought I can’t keep doing this.
Or you do want it, and you’re not yet the person who wants what it takes.
I want a faster time. I want to run under four hours eventually. Maybe under three forty-five.
Early on I wasn’t committed to marathon running at all. Even going into Berlin I thought, we’ll see how it goes, I’ll leave some space in the back half of the year, but I’m not actively looking. And with New York it was, they need someone to raise money, it’s all volunteer, I’m not in perfect condition but I’m probably the best they’ve got.
Now I want to do one. I’m actively looking at what’s next.
That’s very different, and it didn’t come from willpowering myself into wanting something. It came from having an experience, noticing my interest, getting curious, learning more, developing more interest, seeing progress, trusting myself in that progress, having another go, seeing the difference between this time and last time. And then finding out that it didn’t cost me my life. It didn’t cost me my mental health. It didn’t cost me my relationships.
So let’s do it again.
We often stop setting goals because the last one burned us out. We gave so much that we didn’t like the person we became, or our health, or the stress that came with it.
The level of commitment you’ll have next time gets built from evidence that you’re doing something that works for you. It doesn’t get built from thinking you should want something.
Which is why it’s so hard when I ask people what they want next and get a blank stare. That blankness is a rejection of a system that tells us to constantly want more, want this, want that. And it’s a right rejection. You’re sitting there thinking, I don’t even know if I want it, why can’t I be happy with where I am and what I have.
Once we get to a place where we have agency and choice, where we’re putting our stake in the ground and designing it ourselves and working the plan we built, then we can say, I think this is what’s next. Why? Because this is what got created. It’s naturally next.
And it’s naturally next because you’re part of the action now. You’re part of the result. You have far more information and data, and none of it was handed to you.
So you stop trying to make yourself want things. You start asking how do I make the cost of this workable. What’s a price I’m willing to pay. How do I work toward it, and then let me see what happens.
What all of that builds, and this is what happens with the clients I work with, is a person who can hold uncertainty. Who goes after pain instead of avoiding it. Who loves that she’s investing in something deeply, committed to something deeply, engaged in life again. And who is patient enough that she will win.
That’s the primal, animalistic, hungry, raw place where you think, I’m in it. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen or how it’s going to work, but I’m here. I’m attentive. I’m ready.
We can’t make you have grit. We can’t make you hungry. We can’t make you learn the lesson.
You do it because you build things you actually start to succeed in, at prices you’re willing to pay, and then you do it again. And the person on the other side of that can hold the uncertainty of trying something new, having the hard conversation, working on things she doesn’t love. She feels capable even while she’s struggling. She creates hope and agency even when she’s frustrated. She doesn’t resent it when things aren’t working, or wish her life were easier instead of figuring out what she’d do differently and going in for it.
Which brings me back to that thought in the corral, about being gritty and hungry and primal.
That wasn’t a new experience. That person was a teenager on a field hockey team, reading words off the back of someone else’s shirt. She’s been in there the whole time.
And that person is in you too. She just hasn’t been given anything to do where she’s investing in herself in that way again.
Where I am now is different from where I used to be. I have a light, detached attitude of gratitude. I feel patient. I feel smart. I feel like I’m deliberately going after the next thing, and like I have a lot of runway and plenty left to gain.
And it came from having a lot of uncertainty. A lot of I don’t know, and I’ve never done this, and I’m not sure why it’s like this.
So, what do you do with this
It’s October, and we’re all starting to decide what next year looks like.
So: is the plan you’re working from one that you helped build? Or is it something you were handed, that you’ve been quietly adjusting for in your head ever since, the way I was adjusting paces?
Does it feel like a clean plan to you?
That’s a good check as you build this next year. Is this clean? Am I fully behind it? Or am I already making an adjustment to it inside, which means the plan is already wrong?
And here’s the bigger question.
Where else are we saying we don’t want something, when the truer thing is that we haven’t found a way to do it that works for the life we have today?
The role. The promotion. The move. The business. Sometimes we really don’t want it anymore, and that’s fine, and knowing it is worth a lot. But a lot of the time we’re not turning down the thing. We’re turning down the only version of it we’ve pictured.
So if there’s something you want and you don’t want what it takes, you don’t have to want it harder. You can change what it takes until it’s something you’d actually keep doing. Then you let the progress and the evidence build the rest of the plan for you.
One more thing. The time is going to pass anyway.
You’ll be at the end of this year either way, celebrating what happened, and it doesn’t have to be a physical accomplishment. It can be a deep internal change, or a change in your relationships, or the peace you have in your body and your mind.
Those can’t be bought. They have to be earned. And that’s the same moat everyone crosses to get them. You’re not swimming in a different lane. Your challenges are unique to your life, but everyone has something they’re working through to get to the other side of it.
The process doesn’t end. It does give you richer results every single time.
If this is the work you want to do, whether that’s a new career path, figuring out why you feel stuck, deciding whether to leave your job, starting a business, getting your health and energy back, or just bringing back the sense of vitality and agency and spark that used to be there, that’s what we do in Spiritual Achiever® coaching.
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