Ep #89: Determined AF

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 number 89 of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. I’m your host, Jill Angie, and today we are talking about being determined as fuck. So, last week I was coaching a client who is training for the Seattle Rock ‘n’ Roll half marathon in June, and we were kind of talking about her goals for the race. It’s not her first race, not her first half marathon, and in her own words, she said that she’s half-assed her training for every other half marathon that she’s done and this time she has a different goal.

So her goal used to be I want to do this race and get faster or feel better or whatever, but this time she’s setting a totally different goal, and she said, “I really don’t care about setting a PR. I want to see what it’s like to run a race after I’ve done all the training. I want to see how I show up on race day when I’m prepared and confident.”

And it felt like the angels just sang because I’m so in love with this approach. It aligns so well with my own philosophy on setting big goals as a means to evolve. And big motherfucking audacious goals, you know I’m obsessed with them. I love to dream about what’s possible, to imagine doing just insane things that seem like how will that ever happen.

I think it’s really fun and I think I’m super inspired by Elon Musk and the Tesla and the Space X corporations because he – say what you want about the guy, but he set some big goals and then just makes it happen. He’s like, let’s invent an electric car that goes from zero to 60 in three seconds and drives itself. Like okay, and he just went and he did that.

And he’s failed spectacularly along the way but he keeps moving forward because he’s like, I know this is possible and I’m going to make it happen, and don’t even get me started on the rockets. So that guy to me is the epitome of setting big audacious goals and then just making it happen.

But here is the truth about those goals. It is totally fun to set them because when you say I’m going to do this epic thing, I’m going to go run a marathon, you get a hit of adrenaline in your brain. It feels really good. Just thinking about it, your brain starts to imagine what it would be like to cross the finish line of a marathon and when you’re imagining that goal, you have the emotions of that goal.

Your brain doesn’t always know the difference. Brains aren’t so smart. And it feels really good to do that visualization and that imagination. You literally get to experience the joy of that accomplishment for a brief moment while you’re visualizing it and it is addictive. Seriously, just go ahead, try it right now.

Think of a crazy ass accomplishment. Maybe it’s like the Dopey challenge where you do a 5K and a 10K and a half marathon and a full marathon in four straight days. And you’re like, there’s no fucking way I could do that, but think of it. Something you’ve always wished you could do but thought it was maybe out of reach, something other people do it, but they’re just a special unicorn.

Could be a marathon, the Dopey challenge, could be writing a book, could be starting a business, whatever it is. I want you to just close your eyes for a moment and imagine crossing that finish line and holding the medal. Imagine holding your finished book in your hands or cutting the ribbon on the opening day of your new business.

And don’t get yourself all wrapped up in yeah but it’ll never happen. Just imagine it’s happening. Really put yourself there. And notice, it feels really good. Like you just get this sort of flush of excitement and it’s like that moment when you think oh my gosh, the lottery is up to two billion dollars this week or whatever it is and you buy a ticket and you think if I’m holding the winning ticket, here’s what I’m going to do.

And your brain gets high off of thinking of all the things you would do with that money. Brains are not so smart. Brains don’t always know the difference between reality and fantasy. And so that’s what happens when we set these big audacious goals, because we think we go there, to that place in our brain and it feels amazing and we think oh my god, I got to get more of that, I’m going to do this marathon.

It’s like seeing into the future. And that’s why it’s so fun, because we get a glimpse of what the future could be like. We get a glimpse of how great we could feel and for just that moment, you suspend all your bullshit stories and all your excuses and you just live in that future moment of sheer excitement. You can clearly see the reality you can create for yourself, it’s beautiful, life is going to be perfect.

But then it all comes crashing back down to earth when your bullshit story about how you’re not good enough or dedicated enough or talented enough or whatever, like when that story shows up again. So we set these huge goals because what we really want is to be the person who can do those things.

We think I will feel so good about myself if I get that goal and we just assume that getting that goal is going to make us into the person that can do those things. But this is the conundrum. To get the goal, you have to become that person along the way.

Somebody doesn’t hand you a marathon medal and boom, you’re a marathoner. No, you got to train for that. You got to do all the training, you got to show up on race day, you got to do the race. The medal is just the symbol of the accomplishment, and that’s where it gets really difficult and uncomfortable.

And this is why most people don’t even bother setting big goals because A, they know it’s going to be hard, they’re not willing to do hard things because well, we humans just aren’t programmed to do things out of our comfort zone. And then B, they might try, they might do some of the work and fail, and they’re not willing to do that because other people will know they failed and that is just not acceptable.

Which by the way, if you listened to last week’s podcast, episode 88, you know that avoiding failure because you might feel embarrassed or ashamed is just an excuse. Other people’s opinions are none of your god damn business. Stay in your own lane.

Anyway, a little off track there. Anyway, most of us decide not to even bother dreaming because we think that we can’t stand the pain of dreaming about something and imagining it and then not having it because we’re not willing to do the work of taking the dream and evolving into the person who achieves it, and that evolution you guys, that shit ain’t easy.

But even though we might fail, we might take the dream, do the work, do part of the evolution or even do the full evolution and then fuck it up, we’ll be stronger and more resilient as a result of that evolution. But we mistakenly think that the goal, finishing the marathon, finishing the book or whatever, that that is the real prize.

So we totally discount all of the internal rewards we get along the journey. It’s so messed up. Another thing that we do is we believe – you guys, this is so good – we believe because we’ve quit on ourselves in the past, we’re likely to keep doing it so why even bother dreaming about something because you’re just going to give up.

And this is not true but at the same time, it’s kind of true. And I always say that the best predictor of your future success is not what you’ve done in the past. It’s what you’re thinking right now, but the reason you have failed in the past is always what you were thinking at the time. And if you haven’t up-leveled your thinking, you’re just going to repeat history.

So yeah, if you have quit on yourself in the past and you haven’t done the mental work to clean up your flawed thinking, you are likely to quit again. But knowing this, knowing the circumstances of your past don’t predict the future, it is the thinking of your past that you haven’t changed that creates your future, knowing this, you have a choice to work on yourself to change your thinking so that you can get different results.

Does this make sense? Are you nodding along with me right now? And the reason I know all of this is because I’ve lived through it, and I continue to live through it every time I set a new goal over and over and over, my rebel friends. My thinking has held me back so many times and it wasn’t until I started really working on that that I began to succeed and thrive and become super confident, by the way.

But it takes work. A lot of us don’t like that. We just want to go out and run and have it be easy. We want to sit down to write a book and have it be easy. We want to decide to open a business and just have investors and customers knocking down our doors right away. Like, it’s easy. It’s not how any of this works.

And for years, I’ve actually done that with my marathon goal. Every year I say this is the year, and then somewhere along the line, before I even really start training, I quit on myself. I have a million excuses. Some of them are legit, like last year my knee. My knee was fucked up. I could not train. But the year before that I had some lame excuses, year before that, again, lame excuses.

And the reason is that I wasn’t working on my thoughts about my training. I was just excited about being a marathon finisher. I was putting my brain into the space of somebody who crosses the finish line. That felt really good when I imagined it, but I was not excited about being somebody who trains for a marathon. I wasn’t determined to become someone who trains for a marathon.

And without that piece of it, I was never going to become a marathoner if I wasn’t determined to do the training. So I’m actually releasing my goal of finishing a marathon and hear me. It is not because I don’t want that marathon goal, but because that is the wrong goal. This year, I am committing to do all the mental and physical work to evolve myself into someone who prepares for a marathon, who does all the work to be ready on race day.

I can’t control what happens during the race, but I sure can control how I prepare, and that preparation is where the evolution happens. If I make that evolution happen before race day, if I work on that evolution over the next eight, nine months, then race day becomes so much easier. So the evolution is the real goal.

And here’s another secret, and I know this from all the training I’ve done for other people, all the women I’ve trained through their own marathons. A marathon is 90% mental training and 10% physical training. But the problem is most people just do the opposite. They’re like, give me the training plan, I’ll do the work and I’ll show up on race day.

But they spend 90% of their effort planning out the physical training and only 10% attending to their brains. They spend 90% of their effort looking for just the perfect training plan for them and figuring out who their running buddy is going to be and so forth, and they don’t spend any time on what’s going on inside their own mind.

And I get people asking me this all the time. They’re like, hey, what marathon training plan are you using? I’m like, it doesn’t really matter. I’m going to create one for myself, but it really doesn’t matter because that’s only 10% of what I need. The training plan is not the secret. The stuff that I teach you in this podcast about how to manage your mind, that’s the fucking secret.

If you’re spending 90% of your effort planning out your physical training, you’re not developing the skills of consistency, determination, focus, and most importantly, being uncomfortable physically and mentally with yourself without quitting. Marathon training will teach you all of that if you let it, but most people just say I’m just going to white-knuckle through every run. I’m going to be miserable and I’m going to suffer because god damn it, I’m going to cross that finish line and get that medal.

That’s one way to do it. I don’t think that sounds like a lot of fun. Or you can work on your mind and create a rock-solid belief system for yourself that keeps you moving forward even while you want to quit. And we just talked about this in Run Your Best Life. So, I did a whole webinar on creating confidence in that membership group, which also relies on having a rock-solid belief system.

And next month, in May, we’re doing another webinar called there’s no such thing as willpower, in which we’re going to tackle yet another aspect of creating belief systems and as a result, creating motivation. So your belief systems create your feelings, and the feelings of confidence and motivation and determinations are the ones that get you through your training.

And so right now, I’m very deep into creating my own rock-solid belief system. Should patent that. RSBS, my rock-solid belief system. I’m deep into creating my own RSBS. I journal about it every morning and the first thing I do is I try to ferret out all the limiting beliefs that have caused my failure in the past. Whatever bullshit story I have in my brain, and they keep popping up.

I try to find those, I dig them all out, and then I say okay, what do I want to think on purpose. What is the belief that I know will lead me to the result I want? And the result I want, remember, is not to finish a marathon. It is to show up for my race fully prepared because I can’t control what happens on race day but I can control how much I prepare for that race.

And so that is where all of my mental training will be focused. And what I want to do is actually share a quick snippet of a recent journaling session that I did just last week and by the way, if you want to learn more about how this method works, you can check out episode 33 of the podcast. It’s called How to Coach Yourself, or you can just join Run Your Best Life already and I’ll teach all of that to you in the group and you get to practice it over and over again with me and with Jen as we coach you through it.

But anyway, what I do is I start by pulling a thought from my daily thought download – I do these every morning – that I know is getting in my way. And I have this annoying little belief, it’s like a chin hair. You know those chin hairs if you’re a woman and you’re of a certain age, you know that you can wake up one morning and you can have an inch-long chin hair and you’re like, where the hell did that come from?

It just comes out of nowhere. That’s what this belief is like for me, and I keep pulling it out and it keeps coming back up. And the belief is – it sounds something like this – I’ll probably just give up on myself in the summer or procrastinate until it’s too late. And when I think that thought, that I’ll probably just give up on myself, I feel defeated ahead of time.

When I feel defeated, the action I take is to procrastinate doing my training run, or procrastinate figuring out the training plan and scheduling them into my calendar. And I also – because I don’t like to feel defeated – I end up eating a lot of junk food to distract myself from feeling defeated. And then those foods not only do I not get to deal with my feelings but those foods end up making my joints ache, which means running hurts and then I don’t do my long runs.

So it’s like this awful cycle that all starts with this thought of oh, I’ll probably just give up on myself. That’s not what I want. Whether I succeed or fail at that marathon, I am showing up prepared on race day and I know that when I feel determined, when I have that emotion, I show up for myself like crazy.

So the shitty belief system I have now, which is basically just a thought that I’ve practiced over and over again is that I’m probably going to give up on myself, and I’m not going to let that dictate my success because when I think that way, I feel defeated, I feel deflated. I need to feel determined so that I take the action of doing all my training runs. So I’m crafting a new belief system that will get me where I want to be, that will create that feeling of determination in my body.

Now, my intentional thinking pattern, and this is just one of the beliefs I’m creating for myself, is that I’ve decided I want to see what’s possible for me when I push outside of my comfort zone. When I think that, what is possible for me when I push outside of my comfort zone, I feel very determined. And a little curious too, to be honest. I wonder what would happen, but mostly determined.

And determined is my word of the year, it’s the thing that I want to feel as much as possible. I love that emotion because when I feel determined, I plan my training and I just fucking do it. There’s no excuses. I just do it. And the result of that is that I show up for my race prepared. I want every thought that I think about my training to lead to a feeling of determined because determined gets me the actions that I want.

Now, here is the thing though; that new thought, the thought I’m thinking, I want to see what’s possible for me when I push out of my comfort zone, it takes practice. It’s going to take plenty of practice. It doesn’t feel automatic to me right now, but that’s okay. And when we try to change our thoughts, sometimes we think I’ve got this new thought, boom, I should be able to just snap my fingers and I’ll think that way.

It’s really not how it works. Your old belief systems were created because you thought those things over and over and over again. The new belief system is the same thing. So I’ll practice it, just like running. You got to practice to get better. You got to practice to make it automatic.

So I’ll think it to myself when I’m running, I’ll journal about the ways I can step out of my comfort zone. I’ll write down how it feels and what happens when I stop creating excuses. I’ll look at my journal every single day and notice where I’m still thinking those old thoughts and be like, no, stop it. I’ll like, get my finger in my own face and say stop it.

The feeling that I want to have throughout my training is determined as fuck. So I will be taking the belief I just talked about and adding to it with other thoughts that make me feel that way and then practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t happen overnight, it’s not magic. It takes work, just like training for a marathon takes work. You don’t just show up to a marathon start line and expect it to be easy.

Same thing. Changing your thoughts isn’t always easy but it’s worth it. And once you’ve developed the skill of changing your thinking, you can apply it anywhere. That’s the thing. It’s like once you know how to add and subtract, you can balance a checkbook, you can go to college and major in math. You could do a million things once you have the skill of adding and subtracting.

Once you have the skill of changing your brain, it doesn’t apply just to running. You can apply it anywhere. We focus on this so much in the Run Your Best Life community is that – this is my mantra. Changing your brain is the start. It should be at the start of every training plan. Changing your brain should be the start of every training plan.

So I want you to like, really noodle on that this week, my friends. Where is your brain when you’re training? Is your brain in the garbage train thinking this sucks, I’m probably just going to give up, I hate this? Or is your brain up there being curious and saying I wonder what happens when I do these uncomfortable things, I wonder where I could get if I push myself out of my comfort zone.

Changing your brain should be at the start of every training plan. So, one quick thing before we wrap up for this week. I do have a super fun latest obsession that I actually haven’t tried out but I want to talk about it anyway. But first, I want to let you know about two special things we’re doing in Run Your Best Life in May.

So first of all, May is motivation month. We’re going to be working on getting our brains straight so that we stay motivated, and that includes the very special webinar we’re doing called there’s no such thing as willpower, and then the other thing we’re doing in Run Your Best Life in May is kicking off the 10K training course.

So for all of you that were in the 5K course, you get a week off and then we start 10K training if you want to do that. If you weren’t in the 5K course, it’s totally cool. You can still join Run Your Best Life and you can still join the 10K training course. Starts on May 13th and if you want to join it live, you need to sign up for Run Your Best Life right now.

You get that entire class, plus of course, the main motivation series, all the coaching you can handle, access to all of the stuff that we’ve already done, so you get access to the 5K course that we are just finishing. You get all the training materials, all the videos and everything, and you can do it at your own pace, or you can just show up and do the 10K course. It’s going to be amazing.

So if you like the stuff that I talk about in this podcast, you are going to love Run Your Best Life because we go really deep into all those topics. And again, if you want to train for a 10K, we’re starting on May 13th so just join now. The cost to join is only $39 a month and that is for as long as you want to be a member.

There’s no sign up fees, there’s no contracts, there’s no unexpected price changes. If you sign up for $39 right now, you will never pay more than that. So you’re going to go over to runyourbestlife.com to sign up. It’s runyourbestlife.com and all the information is there.

Okay, now as I promised, I have an obsession that I haven’t tried yet and I’m kind of hoping that there’s some of you that have tried this that can write to me and say no, this is a good thing. But I was on Amazon a few days ago searching for a replacement bladder for my Nathan hydration pack. And I found one and then right next to it on the Amazon page was this insulated sleeve that you can put over the bladder to help keep it cold.

And I’m like, what? What I usually do is I fill it with ice cubes and then I’m running with this like, really, really cold thing on my back, and sometimes that’s not super comfortable. It might keep me cold, sometimes in the summer but cool me down a little bit, but honestly, it’s not my favorite thing.

And then you’re already always running the race of has it melted enough for me to drink out of it or is it still a bunch of ice cubes. And so when I saw this insulated sleeve that goes over, and you can get one for two liter or three liter, I think, and my bladder is a two liter. I was like, what? This is a game changer.

So we’re going to have a link to that in the show notes of course if you want to purchase one and buy it, but I want to know like, have you used this thing and does it really work as it’s advertised? Because if it does, oh my god, it blows my mind. So we’re going to have a link to that in the show notes and also to the hydration pack that I use that I highly recommend for busty women.

And I guess everything else that I mentioned can be found in the show notes at notyouraveragerunner.com/89. So between now and next week, I want you to go sign up for runyourbestlife.com and get in on this crazy ass 10K training course that we’re doing. Get in for motivation month. We’re going to get your brain straight and we’re going to do this thing. Until next week.

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.