Ep #59: The Facts About Running

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 59 of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. I’m your host, Jill Angie, and today’s episode is all about getting your facts straight about running. Do this one thing and I promise everything else will be a lot easier.

And actually, that’s really my whole purpose with this entire podcast. To make your running easier, to make your whole life easier, for that matter. And if you want to run a half marathon, I definitely want to help make that easier for you, and that is why I created the Rebel Runner Unleashed program, so that you can relax and know that an expert is directing your training and keeping you on track to run a great race, and have an amazing experience.

We’re going to do New Orleans in a few months, then after that we’re going to do Seattle, and then who knows? Taking suggestions for our third race in 2019. Now, I know you’ve heard me talk about going to New Orleans before, and maybe you thought, “Yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun but I really don’t think a half marathon is something that I could ever achieve.”

Now, I promise you that it is. If it’s something that you want, we can make it happen. And before you make a decision and just say, “That’s off the table for me, I’ll never be able to do it,” we should probably just have a conversation about it and get the facts in order.

Now, you can do that at rebelrunnerunleashed.com. Just set up a call with my team to find out more. It is free. There is absolutely no obligation. It’s just basically a chance to chat to talk about where you are with your running, what it’s going to take to get you half marathon ready, and whether the Rebel Runner Unleashed program is the right choice for you. That’s it.

Alrighty, my rebels. We are kicking off this episode with a great quote from the one and only Mark Twain. “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.” Now, this quote was inspired by one of my clients who just finished her second marathon, and I’m going to tell you her story in just a moment.

But first, I really want to revisit the concepts that I taught you in episode 33 called How to Coach Yourself. Now, the coaching model that I use works on every situation in life. Every single one. No exceptions. It is not just for running. I am teaching you how to life coach yourself, my rebels. So listen up. This coaching model consists of five elements. Circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results.

Circumstances are irrefutable facts. They are data, information. They are things that if you took a poll of every single human on the planet, everyone would agree on it. Now, thoughts are our opinions and beliefs about the facts. We know that something is a thought if not everyone would agree on it.

And our thoughts drive our emotions. Every feeling we have in our lives comes from a thought that happens first. It might actually not always seem like it. Sometimes we think I’m thinking this way because I’m feeling a certain way, but I promise you, it is the other way around. You have a thought and it causes a feeling.

And then our feelings drive all of our actions, and our actions create our results. So that is the model. I call it the CTFAR model. I learned it from Brooke Castillo, and you might remember her from an earlier episode of this podcast. And I use this framework to coach my clients on everything.

And I used it last week to coach my marathon client right after her race. Now, as I mentioned before, she had just finished her second marathon like, about 10 days earlier. And when we had our meeting, she was feeling so discouraged. She told me that she was frustrated because her running speed wasn’t where she wanted it to be, she felt very slow and sluggish, and she just really wasn’t happy about it. And she was definitely not happy about it.

Now, in my mind, she’s telling me this whole story and I’m thinking, girl, you just finished a fucking marathon. Your body’s in recovery. This is normal. You train hard, your race took place under very difficult conditions because it basically rained the entire time and it was cold, it was not pleasant, it was cold and windy. And it’s only been 10 days. Take it easy on yourself.

So that’s what I’m thinking. And I may have said something to that effect, but the next thing I did was ask her to just tell me all of her thoughts. So we put the model up on the whiteboard, and I keep a whiteboard behind me when I do all my video calls with my clients so that they can see what I’m writing out. And so we wrote out circumstance, thought, feeling, action, and result.

And I said, let’s just start with the thoughts. So she started talking to me about all of her thinking, telling me the whole story, there were a lot of thoughts. She had many of them. But the one that was really, really hurting her and making her feel so unhappy was, “I should be farther along by now.”

Now, that is just an opinion, just a belief that she had. It wasn’t the truth, it wasn’t a circumstance. It was not a fact. It was just what she thought should be reality. She kept thinking that thought over and over, turning it over and over in her mind, and it was making her feel awful. I’m sure you can imagine, right? If you had that thought on repeat in your head, you’d feel pretty terrible too.

So the more headspace she gave to it, the more she just let it roll around in her brain without saying it out loud, without writing it out, without really even looking at it, she just let it just run around in her brain like a toddler with an open umbrella in the living room. It’s just wrecking shit left, right, and center.

The more headspace she gave to it, the more evidence she found that she was failing as a runner. Because when we give ourselves a negative thought, our brain is like, okay, let me get evidence to prove you right. If you give your brain a positive thought, again, it will go to town finding evidence to prove you right.

So choose your thoughts carefully, friends. Choose them carefully. Now, I do want you to remember, this is a woman who just finished her second marathon in less than a year. It’s a woman who’s been running for over five years. She has done at least a dozen half marathons. It’s probably twice that. And she’s actually brought her running speed down from just under a 20-minute mile when she first got started to about a 12-minute mile over the summer when she was in training for her marathon.

I mean, come on. You and I both know that that is the exact opposite of failing. But 10 days after her marathon, she was running maybe a 13 to 14-minute mile, maybe like, dipping into 14-and-a-half-minute mile, and she was thinking, “Oh my god, nothing is working right, I should be farther along by now. I’m a failure.”

So this is where Mark Twain comes in. I love that guy, by the way. Mark Twain, he’s the best. He says, “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as you please.” Now, what my client was doing was she was taking a couple of the facts, she was looking at the pace on her three recovery runs after her marathon and then she was letting her brain distort them into a really unfair story. Because in that 10 days while she was in recovery from her marathon, she was running slower.

I mean, that was the truth. She was running slower, but she was distorting that into a really crummy story. And once I knew that her painful thought was, “I should be farther along by now,” I said, “Alright, we’re going to look at all the data. All of it. Including all of the runs in the month following her first marathon.” Which by the way, was just in January of this year. Nine months ago.

And here’s what we found. So, she ran her first marathon in January and the first week after that race, she was a lot slower than normal. She was. Now, she didn’t make up a shitty story about it at the time because it was her first marathon and she’s like, “Oh, well, I just ran a marathon, of course I’m running slower.”

But then in the second week after that first marathon in January, she got about a minute per mile faster, and the third week she got faster again, and then after about a month, she was right back to normal. That was just nine months ago.

So since then, in that meantime, she’s trained for a whole other marathon, she did a ton of speed work on herself, like, in the spring, and she actually clocked some of her fastest miles ever in her history. So she’s been a busy girl, and then she ran marathon number two. And in the first week after marathon number two, she was a lot slower than normal, just like marathon number one.

But here is the really fun part; she was faster in the post-marathon week this time around than she was last time around So all of that drama about how she wasn’t getting any better at running was actually not true. The data was very, very clear about that.

So I want you to always be clear on the facts before you let your mind run amuck. Like, if you’re going to let your mind go to town beating you up, at least let it be right – let it have the facts straight before you think shitty thoughts to yourself. Or maybe you’ll get the facts straight, then you’ll be like, actually, I don’t need to think these shitty thoughts because I don’t want to.

But especially when it comes to your running, it’s so easy for us to look at the microscopic view of like, this particular run that I’m in right now is really hard, obviously I’m a failure at running. And we forget about the run we had the week before when everything felt effortless and amazing. That’s the nature of running, that’s the nature of life.

Ups and downs. As long as your overall trajectory is in the direction that you want it to go, and I don’t necessarily mean every week you have to get better. You may have months where running feels really hard. You may have an injury and have to take time off. That’s all part of the trajectory. As long as you’re continually working on improving, working on moving forward instead of letting yourself get stuck in the mind drama, you’re going to be fine.

See, here’s the thing; our brains are just jerks sometimes. A lot of the time. They’re kind of like those cats, and I have one of those cats, who keep just knocking cups over off the counter for no obvious reason whatsoever other than to torment you. That’s kind of how our brains are. So our brains tend to ignore the actual facts and make us stories. And the stories are just drama. Just drama. Drama sucks. Drama causes problems, and drama is completely avoidable.

Now, last week, I talked about how I love numbers in the episode when I talked about the goals that I have for Not Your Average Runner and how I want to use Not Your Average Runner to help change the world. And I talked about numbers and how I like to set measurable goals so that I can see progress. Because numbers really don’t lie. Numbers tell the truth. Data – I’m a scientist at heart. Data is where it’s at.

So this is why it’s really so important to keep some kind of a running journal. Maybe it’s you write – maybe you write it down in a book, maybe you do what my client, Kristie Bittleston does, who makes these amazing journals with washi tape and all kinds of other stuff, or maybe you use Runkeeper or you use your Garmin or the Nike app or something like that to track every single run.

But do that every run, and then you can look back over time and see the truth, see the circumstances and the facts instead of the story that you’re creating. And here’s the thing; if you’re really not making progress, then you can decide what to do about it but you can decide what to do from a place of having all the information and not just, “Oh, I had one shitty run, obviously I’m failing as a runner.”

Don’t spend hours berating yourself about something that’s not even accurate. Now, fortunately, my client had me to call bullshit on her brain and bring it out of that microscopic view so that she could appreciate the actual progress she had made over the past nine months. That is the power of coaching, rebels. That is the power of managing your fucking mind so that you can actually do the things that you want to do in the world.

Sometimes we can’t see the forest. All we can see is the huge tree in front of us and we think the path is blocked. And then we create this icky story about how much we suck because of the stupid tree in front of us, when in reality, all we need to do is step aside and walk around the tree, and the whole forest is there.

Now, a good coach will help you step back and see that forest, and I like to think of myself as a good coach. It’s one of my favorite things to do is really to help my clients take that – in the corporate world we always called it the $30,000 view. I like to call it seeing the forest instead of the trees. But a good coach will help you find the overall trend, and then decide how you want to think about it.

Okay rebels, we’re heading into our cool down, latest obsessions section of the podcast. And this week I’m going to tell you about Andy’s latest obsession because I really think you’re going to like it and he is truly obsessed. He talks about this thing all the time.

So basically, it’s yet another pair of socks. We talk about socks a lot on the show but socks are really important because they do – they’re one of your first protections against blisters and if your socks aren’t exactly right – and everybody’s feet are different, we’re all the princess and the pea when it comes to our socks – if your socks aren’t exactly right, your run is really going to be sucky and uncomfortable.

So I like to bring you all of the sock options I can just so that you know that you can decide for yourself what works best for you. So Andy’s latest sock obsession is these socks called Darn Tough. It’s like a funny name, but he literally can’t stop talking about them. They come in a ton of colors and styles and designs. They have some pretty ones, they have some manly ones. But they run the gamut from running to hiking to just daily life.

And they’re actually made of merino wool, which even though it doesn’t sound like it would be, it’s a pretty good option for running. And you can get them thin, you can get them thick, but merino wool is really good at wicking away moisture, unlike cotton, which tends to trap it.

Now, there are actually quite a few wool running socks on the market. I’ve tried several of them. The ones that I’ve tried are super comfortable and soft, but frustratingly, the brand that I’ve tried, which I probably shouldn’t say on the podcast but I’m going to, it’s the Thorlo PhD brand. They tend to get holes in the – for me, it’s in the big toe.

And I’ll tell you what, I get very regular pedicures. I do not have like, snaggly toenails or anything like that. I cannot figure out why the holes are wearing through the big toe on those socks for me and not any others. But when you spend $15 on a pair of socks and after like, two months they have a hole in the big toe, I’m not about that. It does not make me happy.

The Thorlo socks, I bought them at REI. The first time I got a hole, I thought, oh, I must have had a faulty pair. So I took them back to the store and I said, “Hey, got a hole in my sock. I’ve had them for two months. Can I have another pair?” and they gave me another pair and within two months, that pair had another in the exact same spot.

So I said I’m done with those particular socks. But here’s the deal; I don’t know if all merino wool socks have that problem or if it’s just the Thorlo PhDs but regardless, the Darn Tough socks have a lifetime guarantee. So basically, these are the last running socks you’ll ever buy. This is what Andy keeps saying to me. He’s like, “I’m never going to buy another pair because if these fall apart, they will send me another set.”

So that’s fun and they’re also made in the USA, which we love. So I suggest you just go ahead and give them a try. There’s going to be a link to buy them in the Amazon show notes. And like, give them a try and then drop us a line and let us know if you liked them.

Alright my rebels, that is it for this week. Everything I mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes at notyouraveragerunner.com/59 and I will 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.