Think Big, Work Hard and Be Patient

“Think big, work hard, and be patient.”

I found myself giving my 6 year-old daughter this advice the other day.  I would love to tell you that I was setting her off on some noble quest for knowledge and self-worth, but the reality was that we were just playing Minecraft.  I was getting tired of watching her building half-finished houses and digging pointless tunnels, so we found the biggest mountain we could and spent an hour or so building a tower made of diamond-blocks atop of it.

We did all this while the NYC Marathon aired live in the other room – the same one I should have been running myself this year, but deferred until next year.  I couldn’t help but notice how well the advice I was giving my daughter translated to my own experiences with the marathon.  I had set lofty goals for myself in 2015 – to run both the Marine Corps Marathon and the NYC Marathon in back-to-back weeks.  Yet as the summer days flew by, my training ran into obstacle after obstacle causing delays and missed goals.

In terms of taking my own advice, I had certainly “thought big,” but it was the “work hard” part where I got lost.  My brain told me I would maintain my performance levels over the medium term with casual diet and training and that I could afford to miss a week here and a week there and just turn it on in the end.  I was wrong.  My performance suffered, I gained weight, and I was unable to achieve my goal.

Since finishing the Marine Corps Marathon last week, I have taken an entire week off – no training, no diet.  Just me and my thoughts (and some leftover Halloween candy.)  There are people who run a marathon, cross it off their bucket list, and then go on with life.  Then there are people who get hooked and find themselves doing it over and over again.  With three marathons under my belt and incrementally slower finishing times in each, I often wonder whether or not I am the kind of person that only runs it only once, but maybe I’m just too stubborn to realize it so I keep signing up for them.

This next year will very likely tell that story.  I watched parts of the NYC Marathon, saw my friend Michele Brodtman in a commercial for the American Cancer Society, tracked people I knew on my iPhone app, and grew madder at myself for not being there in person.

So, I am going to commit myself over this next year and see if it sticks.  I’ve had two years of marathon training under my belt – the first exceeded my expectations and the second disappointed.  I have three marathons on the schedule for 2016, culminating in my return to NYC next November.  It’s a long ways away, but I’m committing myself to it.  I need to return to the things that made my first year successful and I need to find new ways to challenge myself and keep me away from the Almond Joys that are still in my daughter’s Halloween bag just calling my name.

I'm setting lofty goals for that starting line next November - I want to run more races, especially half marathons, I want to lose another 40 pounds, I want to post to the blog at least once a week, I want to raise some more money for the American Cancer Society, but mostly I just want to have that feeling of accomplishing a hard-earned, long-term goal.  And for that, I just have to listen to a wise person I know who said...

Think big, work hard, and be patient.