Ep #101: The Value of Being Imperfect with Jaclyn Ricchio Stover

Welcome to The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you’re a woman who is midlife and plus sized and you want to start running but don’t know how, or if it’s even possible, you’re in the right place. Using proven strategies and real-life experience, certified running and life coach Jill Angie shares how you can learn to run in the body you have right now.

Hey rebels, you are listening to episode 101 of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. I’m your host, Jill Angie, and today I have a really awesome guest for you. Her name is Jaclyn Ricchio and we’re going to talk all about the value of being imperfect.

And y’all know I believe that perfectionism is a motivation killer, so I am super excited to bring you today’s conversation because Jaclyn’s philosophy on the subject is very close to mine. So a little bit about Jaclyn before we start. She is a certified health coach and an avid runner who’s completed not one, not two, but three full marathons and is currently training for her fourth.

She is also the host of the podcast Actually, You Are a Real Runner and is that not the best title ever? Kind of jealous because now I want to name my podcast that. So she’s host of the podcast Actually, You Are a Real Runner and she also helps casualties of Whole30 and other restrictive diets stop obsessing, stop binging, and learn to enjoy food again. So we had an amazing chat and I’m just going to shut up now and start the interview so you can enjoy it.

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Jill: Hey rebels. So I am here this week with a very special guest, Jaclyn Ricchio Stover. We are going to talk about the concept of imperfect running and imperfect movement, and y’all know that I’m a big fan of being okay with sucking at it as long as you need to, and so we’re going to kind of talk about that today.

So Jaclyn is actually the host of the podcast called Actually, You Are a Real Runner, which is kind of the best podcast name I have ever heard, and she’s also an imperfect eating coach, which means that she helps casualties of Whole30 and other restrictive diets stop obsessing, stop binging, and start enjoying their fucking food again. So we’re going to talk about how she applies those concepts of imperfect eating to running and movement today, so welcome Jaclyn. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Jaclyn: Thank you so much. I feel like I should add that F bomb in there into my bio. I love it.

Jill: You totally should. I think the world doesn’t have enough F bombs. This is my opinion. So tell me what this concept of imperfect running and imperfect movement means to you because it sounds kind of awesome to me.

Jaclyn: Yeah. So it’s so funny. I had been working on these different ideas for a long time, and just watched the Netflix special with Brené Brown and after I watched it, I was like, you know, I think I have some Brené Brown books. And I went back – we had just moved, and I found – I was like oh my gosh, I read The Gifts of Imperfection about four years ago, completely forgot about it, but the ideas in there definitely seeps through my mind and that was probably the first time that I was like, I don’t have to be perfect and also the first time in my life that I realized perfectionism wasn’t actually a good thing all the time.

I remember in high school, one of my art teachers told my mom like, she’s a perfectionist and I was like yeah, I’m a perfectionist. No, what my art teacher meant was I never attempted anything if I wasn’t going to be perfect at it. And so I think that, especially as adults, we get into this idea of I’m going to do the things that I’m good at because it feels good to do things that you’re good at and I’m not going to do any of the things that I suck at.

And that’ll give us really great careers. You can be really career driven and be really good at that one thing that you are good at, and then miss out on so much of life because you’re so afraid to let yourself do something that you’re not going to be good at.

Jill: Oh my gosh, I 100% could not agree more with that and we’ve even been talking a lot about this in Run Your Best Life this month is that perfectionism destroys motivation. Like, you’re unable to get excited about stuff unless you’re 100% sure you’re going to nail it, and there’s just no guarantees that we’re going to. So then somebody like that goes out to do a half marathon and trips and falls halfway through or something and it sends them into a spiral because oh, I didn’t finish what I started and I’m just shit.

Jaclyn: Yeah. And it’s really hard I think too because we have a lot of masculine messages sent out to us, especially on Instagram I see it all the time. I feel a lot of business things, so I get a lot of business-y – these billionaire ideas and it’s like, well, that’s not how my life is and I’m actually going to be okay that everything isn’t perfectly lined up like it is in your box, and I’m also okay with letting go of that. My life isn’t going to be like your life and that’s okay with me. I am deciding. I am making that decision that I’m okay things are not going to be perfect.

And my background before I got into coaching, I was an elementary school teacher, and when you teach five-year olds, things aren’t perfect. It’s just not. It’s not. But I have that idea like I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this, and I think that once you start working with humans, you realize oh, that’s not how humans work. That’s just not how it works, and I just saw that too when I was working with five-year olds.

In the actual work, teaching kids to not be afraid of mistakes, teaching kids to see mistakes or see challenges or mess ups or failures or whatever as those are teaching points. That’s where we’re learning from. But I can think of so many students that were so afraid to try sounding out a word because oh my gosh, I know I don’t know how to sound this out so I’m not even going to try. Or one time I was teaching a class with puzzles or games or something, we were using games and it was like, a student that was afraid to make a move in this game because she was like, overthinking it.

So it took her 20 minutes to decide what move to make, however a student that was like, I’m going to do a move, I’m going to figure out this game by messing up a ton, that person’s going – they’re going to get those many more reps in. So yeah, the gifts of imperfection, letting go of that, it’s the opposite of what we think. We’re like, no, I have to be the A+++ student in everything I do. It’s opened up so much in my life.

Jill: I love that so much. And I see this all the time on Instagram. People will post something like failure is not an option and I think like, failure is always an option, and failure should be – you should fail on purpose. Put yourself in a position where you’re striving for something, you’re pretty sure you’re going to fuck it up but you’ll learn from it and nobody died from failure. I feel like it’s not this horrible thing. All it is is just you fail at something and you feel bummed out, maybe you feel ashamed, or embarrassed or something. It’s just a feeling. It’s not – nobody burned your house down. So how do you apply this to movement and running and so forth?

Jaclyn: Yeah, so I think that it came about, kind of the same thing with food and eating and everything else was I made all of these mistakes and then had to scale back a bit. I went to the extreme of I’m going to follow this training plan exactly to a T and I’m going to push myself, push myself, and then realize like, okay, that’s not going to work for the rest of my life. This might work for this short period of time, and I think that we kind of all go through those.

We’re super motivated and super like, no pain no gain, and it doesn’t matter if I only have five hours of sleep, I’m going to push through, but kind of seeing like that’s not going to work for the rest of my life. That mentality is not going to get me to being 88, 89 years old with a strong body and a strong mindset. So I think that I really saw it, especially this past year.

We got married in May of 2018 and then kind of set off on a year of travel. And this is the first year that I wasn’t training for a marathon. I always saw training for a marathon is the thing that I just do. I just run marathons. That’s what I do. And so this was the first year that I was like, I’m going to have to figure out what movement looks like in a consistent manner because my body feels best when I’m moving it.

Like, it’s not fun – sitting on an airplane for 12 hours you think about that, you’re like, oh my gosh, I just want to get up and move. There are periods in my life where that was my life. I was very sedentary, didn’t do anything, and then went to the extreme and now scaling back, there’s a way to be consistent and still be imperfect. So this past year, we did a road trip through the south. We went to Thailand for three weeks. We did a 35-day road trip from Chicago to California, up to Seattle and back.

And it’s like, yeah you know, maybe someone super masculine may have been like, you’re making excuses, you’re not enough, you didn’t train for – but it was like no, this was this period of time where I allowed myself to move my body when I could because I wanted to and not because I was perfectly following a training plan. And what happened was I wasn’t super sedentary; I wasn’t just laying around and a couch potato. What happened was I actually fell back in love with running and fell back in love with moving my body and noticing how my body felt instead of just follow the plan, follow the plan, follow the plan.

Jill: Wow, isn’t that fun? You know that just as a runner, a lot of the gains in strength that our body makes is when we are resting. It’s because you push yourself and push yourself and push yourself, and muscles don’t really recover and repair until we take rests. So resting is literally just as important as the challenge phase of running or movement, but we kind of forget that because we’re not actively doing anything.

So it sounds to me like you got that, not just the physical rest to fall back in love with running but also you got the mental rest from it so that you could sort of let your brain recover from the thinking that it has to be a certain way. I love that so much.

Jaclyn: What I had found every time that I was training for a race was I would follow the motions, do the plan, and I would feel sick to my stomach about running after I finished a race. I would be like, I don’t want to run, I really feel sick thinking about running, and it’s like, that’s not the relationship that I want to have with running or with exercise or movement of anything. I don’t want to be forcing myself to do something and I also don’t want to feel this distaste in my mouth about something that I know I love.

And really, these periods of rest where I was able – I still ran the last year. I was on a podcast a while ago and I told my – I was like, you know, I guess I’m just kind of a casual runner right now. I’m not training for any races. I’d done a couple of races, a couple of 5Ks or whatever. I’ve done them, but I didn’t specifically train for anything in the last year and it was fun. We did the Peach Tree road race last year in the summer in Atlanta, and it was like, I didn’t care about my time, we stopped and grabbed a beer in the middle of the race, we stood in line for pizza in the middle of the race. I didn’t care and it was fun again.

And then the crazy thing too is like, a couple months ago I ran a 10-miler here in Chicago and something I wouldn’t have been able to do five years ago, but I had been, again, imperfectly consistently moving my body for the past year that running the 10-miler wasn’t that big of a deal. And that sounds weird because I couldn’t run a mile five years ago. But I still – my mind was strong, I was listening more to my body, and I was like, if it hurts I’ll walk off and it’s not a big deal, but I was like, I think I’m okay.

And then I also noticed like, my recover time, I was mentally ready to go running three days later. My body was ready to go running three days later and it’s like, I’ve never actually wanted to go running after doing a long-distance race. But it was the first time. So yeah, it’s so crazy that resting didn’t mean that I was giving up. Resting meant I was waiting until I was ready again.

Jill: Yeah, I just love that. It’s almost like when you’re asleep, your body does so much repair and rejuvenation, and I think just the period of rest like, taking time away from putting all your focus in one area is just the same place. It just gives your body a chance to almost get stronger in other areas, right? You know what I find so interesting too, I have a lot of clients that I’ll give them a training plan for a race or whatever, and they’ll miss a run.

They’ll miss a four-mile run and they’ll be like, oh my god, have I ruined everything? I’m like, no, really the most important thing you can do when you’re training for any race is to just be consistent. And I think like you just said that you were imperfectly consistent, but that consistency, whether you’re sticking to a specific prescribed training plan or you’re just consistently moving your body and continually getting out there, I think that’s the best training of all because that trains your brain to savor and enjoy, rather than – each run is not just a means to an end. Each run is not just like, this is going to get me closer to my goal of this race. Each run in and of itself is an event to be enjoyed.

Jaclyn: That’s something – yeah, I love that. Yeah, something to enjoy. And with the imperfect consistency, so I didn’t grow up as an athlete. I did not do any sports or running was the mile time and gym and everyone encourages like, there was nothing about running or sports or anything athletic. I still struggle. It’s something I know about myself like, when someone’s like okay, do this with your body, it takes me processing what they’re saying.

Like we’ve gone to dance classes and I’m like wait, which side is my left side, or I’ve gone to a couple CrossFit classes and they’re like, just do this, and I’m like, oh my gosh, I don’t get it. And I used to get really frustrated because my husband will pick stuff up really fast. However, he was an athlete growing up. He’s had 30-something years of his brain telling his body how to do something that I missed out on. I didn’t have that growing up. I didn’t do sports.

And so what I found though is that that stuff is getting easier for me. Maybe I will never be like a star dancer, but me getting back out there and running or those things, it’s been so consistent for the last year, few years, that it’s not that big struggle. It wasn’t me sitting on the couch for 12 months. It was me, I’ll go for a couple runs here and there, I’ll go for a couple gym workouts. I didn’t lose it because I didn’t specifically train for something.

And I think that’s the thing. Sometimes I think that can be, unfortunately, our motivation is I have to keep going because if I don’t keep going and things aren’t perfect, I’m going to lose all this, I’m going to fall back to – like there’s that fear. And so then that’s never a fun place of doing something because you fear – it can work for a little bit but not long term.

Jill: Right, when you fear losing something, I think you hold onto it in a way that doesn’t feel good. Think about if you’ve ever had a boyfriend that you were afraid he was going to break up with you and you’re just like, oh my god, I’m going to be the perfect girlfriend, and you just start doing all these things and he’s just like, yeah, you’re weird and I’m out of here. Like, it’s creepy and needy, and I think if we’re creepy and needy with our running, it gets hard and it gets not fun.

And I also think that that’s when we end up getting injured is when we’re holding onto it so tightly that we don’t listen to anything else and we’re just like, oh my god, I can’t take a week off because then I won’t be able to run my marathon. It’s like, of course you will. It’s so funny that we think we’re going to lose all this fitness if we skip running for a few days, and really I think it takes a couple weeks of not running for you to see a really noticeable effect. That’s just fascinating.

Jaclyn: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the hard things too is that we can have those short-term goals, like the race or whatever, but when we’re thinking long term, who do you want to be in your lifetime? What is that relationship you want to have with movement over the course of five, 10, 15, 20 years? Then it’s like – those short-term races, they’re fun and they are important. They are, and they’re motivating, but also in the grand scheme, over the course of 20 years, if you take a week off, it’s not that big of a deal, but I think that it’s the mindset like, what are you telling yourself about that time off?

If you’re telling yourself you’re a failure, this sucks, I’m the worst, then that week off will probably turn into a longer time off, but if you’re telling yourself my body needs this time off, like I had to be comfortable with telling myself training for marathons isn’t fun anymore. It’s not something I want to do, and I need to be okay with that. So it’s like that self-talk. What are you telling yourself about what you’re doing?

Jill: So how did you get to that point? Because you were somebody who was like, very much this is what I do, this is who I am, and now you’re talking differently to yourself. What was that evolution like for you?

Jaclyn: How to piece all that stuff together because there’s that thing – we all know that saying like, you would never talk to a girlfriend the way that you talk to yourself, then you still talk to yourself like a jerk. And I also think that every time that I’m in a position where I’m the beginner and I’m the kindergartener, I realize how important this is. And so when I think about how I would talk to a kindergartener to help them learn something, I would never ever berate them, I would never yell and scream at them.

And maybe I did that my first year of teaching like I’m going to be strict teacher and get things how I want, and you get a very short-term turnout. It’ll work for two seconds and then you realize the only way that you’re going to get people to do stuff is by being a jerk and that’s not a fun way to live. And so I think I saw that – if the only way I can get myself to do things is by being a jerk, this is not the life I want to live.

I think that looking – who is the person I want to be and am I living that day-to-day? I don’t want to be a person that’s a jerk to myself all the time. It’s not fun. Getting the medal, the means to the end, it’s just not worth it. I think about that a lot. I think that just kind of – we’re on this planet but we don’t know when our last day is. We’ve had a lot of deaths in my family. We had some friends that have died young and those always put things into perspective.

Living the life that you want, and that doesn’t mean YOLO, go out and do crazy stuff, but like, having that integrity, day to day, being kind to yourself, being kind to others, and so this being a jerk to myself to get a race done, that’s not fun. That’s not the life I want to live. I think a lot of personal development, listening to podcasts, reading books, doing – listening to this stuff and saying all of that.

So there probably wasn’t a day where I was like everything, but just over time. There’s still stuff that comes up where I’m like huh, why do I keep saying that? That’s not helpful. Let me reframe that. So yeah, I think that just day to day, things kind of pop up and you’re like, oh, interesting.

Jill: And like, you make incremental little changes day after day. I like to think of personal development, whether it’s developing as a runner or as a person or whatever it is you’re trying to change about yourself is rather than it’s like a snap your fingers and you’re different, it’s more like literally an evolution. And when you think about how humans evolved, it wasn’t like one day there were dinosaurs, or I don’t know, but one day there were gorillas or monkeys and the next day there were humans.

It took billions of years or thousands of years. I’m not really good with the timing. But you know what I mean. It didn’t happen the next day. It wasn’t like okay, humans are like monkeys 2.0 and boom, we’re done. There was a little change in the DNA and a little change in the DNA, and then after 10,000 years you look back and you’re like, oh my gosh, it’s a whole different organism. And I think we’re exactly the same way with our thinking changes very slowly, but it changes over time.

And as long as we keep working towards those incremental changes and doing it imperfectly – because I work with my clients on changing their thinking about a lot of different things, and so many of them get frustrated. They’re like well, I just want to think differently. I’m like, it’s not how it works. But if you can approach it imperfectly and be okay with making a few incremental improvements and then maybe backsliding a little bit and then making a few more incremental improvements. When you are working with somebody about either their eating or their movement or something, what is a baby step that you give them to get started?

Jaclyn: Yeah, I think that finding joy with something. So this is the opposite of I feel like a lot of masculine energy, kind of like people that maybe I followed in the past where I was like okay cool, I’m going to do exactly what this person did. I think that the more that I’ve actually found female mentors, whether I have a business coach or listening to podcasts or reading books written by women, I’ve never been a super girly girl so this was new to me to like, oh, I can learn from other women.

But I think that that has been so helpful with me too. So when I am working with a client, again, all my clients are female as well. We’re working on small steps. So instead of you’re going to see someone else that is like cool, here’s the goal, here’s the deadline, go, go, go, a lot of us working together is there are going to be a few steps forward, a few steps back. But we’re going to start with finding joy during it instead of focusing on the outcome. Let’s focus on the process. Let’s focus on enjoying these things.

I love the quote by Geneen Roth and she says who you are on the journey is who you will be when you arrive. And so like, yeah, there’s so many times that you get to that destination, you’re like, I’m not happy, I did all the things and I’m not happy. So it’s like, we’re going to work on that joy and that happiness as we’re working together. So it’s something really small like, when we’re working with food is how can you enjoy this meal or when we talk about movement is well, I don’t coach people on running.

Like some of my clients will be like cool, I want to take up running. Some of them are more into dance, and we talk about movement. We don’t call it exercise. Exercise, I mean, it’s a fine word but I think sometimes we think about exercise as no pain no gain, we think of gym class, or we think of it like this is what I’m going to do to torture my body. So calling it movement, what movement does your body need today.

You might have a really long day where movement is literally just you getting up and walking a little bit more. You taking the dog for a little walk. Going for a walk by yourself during your lunch break. You might not need to run three miles today. Maybe you need to just move. Maybe you don’t need to go to a CrossFit class. Maybe it feels better for you to do a dance class and that’s how you’re adding joy.

For me, going to a dance class would be torture and I would hate it, but for someone else, they’re finding joy in that so how do we do that? How do we shift things to actually enjoy the process, enjoy the journey, find joy and happiness along the way so that it’s not just this get to the thing and hate yourself in the process and hate yourself on whatever day it is that that race or whatever goal is.

Jill: Yeah, I love that. And so do you ever have clients who – they come to you and they say I really hate doing this thing but I want to learn to love it? I’m curious about that because so many of my clients, they want all the medals because they like the accomplishment, they like having run the race, they like being able to say like look, I did all these half marathons, but the actual active running they don’t love. And I think it would be so awesome to have a way to just say like, you don’t necessarily have to stop running. Maybe there’s a way to learn to love it if you start doing it differently or if you change your thinking about it.

Jaclyn: Yeah, that’s interesting. So I’ll give myself as an example with that because I don’t know why I wanted to become a runner. I kind of do. I just saw people running and I was like, wow, that’s cool, they’re just along the lake in Chicago on Lake Shore Drive, that looks really fun, I wish I could do something like that. But I hate running, there’s no way I could train my brain to do it.

So the way that I got myself to learn to love long distance running was by listening to podcasts, which a lot of running coaches like, don’t have anything in your ear, you’re not real if you do this. But that is how I learned to love running long distances. I used to listen to This American Life and I would get so engrossed in the story. So random, but I can think about specific episodes that I listened to or back when Serial, the first season of Serial. I listened to that.

The first half marathon I did I listened to several episodes of Serial as I was running it. That helped me enjoy it and it helped me push myself a little bit further. And so yeah, running was still hard, it was still something I had never done. I looked forward to listening to a podcast that was like, special for running and not something that I listened day-to-day. I’m never going to just sit down and listen to a podcast at my table, but it was something like, I want to go running because I want to listen to that. So that was something that kind of helped me train my brain to push a little further and to train my body and make it enjoyable.

Jill: I love that. And so it was like, you linked it with something you liked doing so then the activity of running became something – it just became associated with that. So what are some of your favorite podcasts to listen to when you’re running? Because right now I’m obsessed with My Favorite Murder, which is like the best because it’s hilarious but then I’m also fascinated by true crime so it’s like, true crime and comedy. It’s all good. But what are some of your favorites to listen to?

Jaclyn: Yeah, I still love This American Life. I have listened to Serial again. That’s so embarrassing, but I also love How I Built This, which is also by NPR. Have you heard it before?

Jill: I have not.

Jaclyn: Oh yeah, business owner, it’s amazing. They go into – I just love hearing rags to riches stories. I love hearing just how people have had challenges and they weren’t supposed to make it and they did. There’s an episode about the guy who made RX bars and he’s from Chicago. He’s dyslexic and he struggled in high school and really struggled throughout life and got into CrossFit and made this bar, learned how to market it and it’s so cool to me. And I think that again, relating – running isn’t just running. It is learning how to do things that you’re not good at.

And so when you can see that thing in something else, it helps , I think, just relating it to other things. So I love How I Built This. So many good episodes. What else? My business coach, her podcast The Best Life. I love that. Her thing is like, to look around any time that you’re doing something. Right now, it’s the afternoon and I’m not at a nine to five job right now. I’m recording a podcast with you. This is so amazing. So just that taking gratitude for the small things. This is the best life. Or even running. There were times where I was like, wow, this is the best life. I’m out running. This is so cool. And TED talks, or TED radio hour. I love those two.

Jill: I love that one. That’s so cool. And I think podcasts are – there’s something about when you’re running that it frees your brain up to do other things. It’s some sort of weird magical brain leg connection that when you’re running, I find I absorb the information in podcasts, I do some of my best thinking when I’m running because it’s like, I’m just freed up my brain to – I’m not even explaining it very well, but there’s just something about walking and running for me.

I don’t experience so much at cycling, but also, I don’t listen to anything in my ears when I go cycling, so maybe that’s it, but it’s a very powerful time for your brain – maybe it’s because your brain is bathed in endorphins when you’re running. And it’s just more open to think of possibilities instead of impossibilities, I guess.

So something else that you just said, because you’re an entrepreneur and I think entrepreneurs, if you’re going to be successful running your own business, you have to be willing to be okay with being imperfect, right? If you’re waiting for everything to be perfect, your customers are going to be like, I don’t know, she just – I wanted to hire her but she said I had to wait until everything was perfect. It’s fascinating.

Jaclyn: And sometimes I think about that like, as I’m coaching someone, I’m like, crap, is doing this on my own, do I have a leg up on people? Because I have to experience this struggle in another place in life, so maybe – am I learning lessons from that and then I can apply it to that. Is that why? But I try to remind people too, especially the women that I work with that are moms. I’m not a mom, we’re not having children, and I always am like, think about all the crazy things your body has done. You grew a human inside your body. You birthed a human and survived. That’s insane.

There were so many challenges in bringing up a child, like there are so many things that you can learn from that and I think it’s that too. Applying that oh wow, I wasn’t a perfect mom and it is okay that I’m imperfectly raising this child and they’re going to turn out fine and there were so many mistakes, but kind of seeing that I think again, it’s so important to look for evidence of where have you done something like this in other areas of your life because you have. You just have, but something you just need that reminder that those things are successes too and if you can make those links, you’ll start to feel more confidence. You’ll start to see like, oh, I can do hard things. I can do this.

Jill: I love that. And I forgot to ask you at the beginning of the show, how did you get into this kind of coaching from being a teacher? I’ve just realized we didn’t even cover that.

Jaclyn: Let’s see, when I was a teacher, I always worked in high poverty schools, under-funded, like 34, 35 kindergarteners in the classroom. No teacher’s aide or if I had a teacher’s aide, I was like, sharing it with the other teacher and it just was really stressful. And I went through a period where I just didn’t know how to take care of myself.

No one taught me this is what you’re supposed to eat, this is why exercise is important, this is how to not be a jerk to yourself, and I think too that there were times my administration was very much no things have to be perfect, we need to sweat the small stuff, your kids need to stand in a line perfectly and all of that stress of oh my gosh, I’m not doing anything right and I don’t know how to take care of myself.

And I really developed a lot of anxiety and I just wasn’t taking care of myself. From there, went into the crazy like, well, I’ll do Whole30, that’ll fix everything. I’ll start running. I know, I should run a marathon. Let me just do everything all at once. And that never works out.

So from that, again, seeing those themes of going from zero to 100 of like, I’m not doing anything for myself. Now I’m going to do everything for myself, but what I was doing for myself ended up being punishment, the way I was using food, the way I was using exercise, the mean things I was saying to myself.

So I think that going from zero to 100, to the extremes, and then having to scale back and kind of seeing that with people as well, the way they use exercise and the way they figure out their relationship with food, well, how do we get to that spot in the middle? How do we do that when it comes to exercise, when it comes to food? How do we say kind things to ourselves? I’m so passionate about that because I struggled with it for so long.

Jill: I mean, I think it’s, in my opinion, easier to get to a middle spot with exercise and with food than it is with our self-talk. So how do you help somebody stop being an asshole to themselves?

Jaclyn: I think sometimes we are so used to doing stuff for other people or someone else to judge us, whether that is a boss or our mom or I don’t know, we’re always doing stuff for other people and they’re expecting us to be perfect, and there’s so many times that I get on a call with a client and I’m like, I’m giving you permission – listen to my words, I’m giving you permission to be imperfect. I’m telling you it is okay that you went to McDonald’s and ate a cheeseburger.

No other health coach is going to tell you that it’s okay. I know that you did the best that you could in those circumstances and I need you to start seeing that too. You didn’t eat perfectly but you did the best for yourself. So I think sometimes having someone tell you those – getting that outside permission takes stress off and allows you to give yourself that permission.

And then working through that, so we do a lot of listen to what you’re saying and matching up – if this is the person you want to be, these are some of the things that someone like that would say. These are some of the actions someone like that would say, these are some of the feelings that you want to feel. So how do we match those up?

But a lot of it is like, you have to hear – once you get aware of what a jerk you are to yourself, it’s like oh, no wonder. No wonder. But a lot of times we’re on autopilot and you don’t hear those things that we’re saying to ourselves, or we don’t realize that we internalize them.

Jill: Right, and the thing is if somebody were standing next to you shouting it in your ear, you’d realize it immediately. But when it’s in your own head, it just seems like oh, this is just how things are instead of when you say to yourself that was a really dumb thing to do, you just believe it was a dumb thing to do. You think you’re just telling yourself the truth when in reality, it’s just a shitty opinion that you have. I just love that.

And I love how you’ve taken everything you learned as a teacher and then your own personal experience and combined it so that you could help other women kind of get through it. Because yeah, you don’t have to have lived through the exact thing to understand just the concept of finding a happy medium that keeps you moving forward. So good.

Well, okay, so we’re about out of time. Is there anything that you would like the Not Your Average Runner community to know, either about you or about running or – what are some words of wisdom that you have for the listeners today?

Jaclyn: Yeah, so I love to talk about how I got the name for the podcast, Actually, You Are a Real Runner. This was something that as I was talking to women and listening to myself, someone would be like oh, you’re a runner, and I’d be like yeah, well you know, I had run two marathons, I’m not really because I run-walk and I don’t win the race. One person wins the race. No one wins the race.

The other 99.9% of the people running don’t win the race. But all of these cool, I do this thing but I also have all these clarifiers so that I downplay myself. And I saw this in people. People that have done the Boston Marathon. Like, I’m sorry, who gets to call themselves a runner if you don’t get to call – is it just the Olympic athletes? I don’t get it. Who’s a runner?

And when I think about the first time I ran a half marathon I was working at a tutoring center and a five year old was like – or I think I was like hey, I’m not going to be here next week because I’m running this race and I came back and he was like, did you win the race? And I was like no, I’m not a real runner. And he was just like, what do you mean you’re not a real runner?

But that hit me because when you tell a five-year-old that they’re going to work on reading, you tell them that they’re a reader because they take on that identity. If they’re a reader, what do readers do? Readers read. When you’re five years old, an adult looking at a five-year old’s book, it’s short vowels you’re working on, it’s blends, it’s the cat went to the house, the cat went to the barn. It’s very repetitive. It’s not real reading, but for a five-year-old, yeah, it is.

That’s real reading. Handing them a Harry Potter book is not real to them. It’s gibberish, but at their level, it is. So I just found that in my classroom, I would tell – if we’re getting out our reading books, readers, get out your reading books. Writers, get out your writing composition books. Scientists, we’re going to do science today. So when we tell ourselves this is who I am, we start to feel a little bit more confident, we start to do the actions of someone that was like that.

So if you’re struggling with running and you’re downplaying yourself and you’re throwing in these qualifiers, maybe it’s just okay to say I’m a runner, or if you want to say I’m a run-walker or whatever. But it’s okay to say that even if you’re not an Olympic runner, even if you – it’s okay. I mean…

Jill: Even if you’ve never run a race, it’s okay. It’s all okay.

Jaclyn: It’s okay. I think we’re just so afraid like someone else is going to – no, and actually, you talking about it might actually inspire someone else to be like oh, tell me more about training, what’s that like? I’ve always thought about running, tell me more about it. It would open up so many other things for yourself and for other people as well.

Jill: I love that. And so your podcast name is Actually, You Are a Real Runner, which really is probably the best podcast name I’ve ever heard. It’s pretty awesome. So thank you for sharing that because I mean, that’s kind of our philosophy here at Not Your Average Runner as well is that you don’t have to be an Olympic athlete and you don’t have to run the whole time and you still get to call yourself a runner. So how can people get in touch with you? They can listen to your podcast. Where can they find your podcast? Is it on iTunes and Android and all the Google stuff?

Jaclyn: Yes. Well, iTunes and Spotify are the main places that you can find it, and then my Instagram is jaclyn.ricchio.stover.

Jill: Awesome. And we’re going to have links to that in the show notes as well. Is there something on your website that – like a free thing that people can download maybe or to check out? Do you have a blog that they can follow?

Jaclyn: Yes. So they can go to – there’s two places. They can go to jaclynricchio.com, which didn’t change over because I just got married and branding is like, what do I do with this? But jaclynricchio.com and there are a couple freebies there. Making eating easy for them and then also they can go to imperfecteating.com. There’s kind of a questionnaire like hey, are you a casualty of all these other diets and don’t want food to be the sole stressor of your life. How to make it neutral. So those are the places.

Jill: Love it. Alright, well thank you so much for being here today, Jaclyn. This is fun. I’m glad that we got to connect like this.

Jaclyn: Awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Jill: Alright.

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Hey rebels, I hope you enjoyed my chat with Jaclyn. Now, if you want to get in touch with her, all the links can be found in our show notes at notyouraveragerunner.com.101. And you can also find her podcast and all of her contact info at imperfecteating.com. And you can also find her on Instagram @jaclyn.ricchio.stover. And we will also have that link in our show notes. I hope you have an amazing week, rebels, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you liked what you heard and want more, head over to www.notyouraveragerunner.com to download your free one-week jumpstart plan and get started running today.