Ep #82: How to Stay Overwhelm-Free to Keep Moving Forward

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 82 of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. I’m your host, Jill Angie, and as I was preparing today’s podcast, I thought, damn this show has come so far in the past year. Like, we debuted on January 18th 2018 and actually, I just realized I completely forgot to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the show.

But I mean, here we are. It’s March 6th or 7th when this is going to come out and it’s been over a year so I’m going to celebrate that today and there’s a little giveaway I’m doing at the end of this podcast where you can get something fun in the mail from me. It’s actually something that I really did mean to do in January. I got it in January and I thought, I’m going to do it and give it away, and then I completely spaced out.

Anyway, it’s the beginning of March, better late than never. And when I first started recording this show, this podcast in January 2018, I was actually pretty overwhelmed. I was working with a podcast producer and he guided me through a lot of what I needed to do to make the show happen, but there was a lot to do, you guys.

And so the goal was to get three episodes recorded to launch the show and then after that I had to do one episode a week. And I’d never done a podcast before, I’d never really done anything like this at all and I had no idea like, how I was going to pull it off. I just sort of had this belief that like, yeah, I could probably figure it out and I hired my producer to help me with that.

But I promised that I’d do this episode a week and what that really meant was that every single week, I’d have to sit down, think about what to say, prepare some notes, and then actually sit down and do it. And I mean, it sounds kind of easy but I’ll tell you what, there are many, many weeks that I procrastinated it to the last minute because it was just – because I just kept thinking like, oh my gosh, this is going to be so hard, I have so much to do, and I would just get so overwhelmed.

And every single week, I had to keep going through this over and over again. And so what I started learning was kind of the lesson that I’m going to teach you today and I want to sort of talk about how that evolved. So basically, I’d never done a podcast before, obviously I already said that, wasn’t really sure if I could do it every week, but I committed to it.

I kind of jumped in with both feet before I really knew what was involved. I mean, I have several friends that have very successful podcasts and you know, I kind of talk to them a little bit about like hey, what’s it like. So my friend Kara Loewentheil with Unf*ck Your Brain, my friend Corinne Crabtree with Losing 100 Pounds, my friend Rachel Hart with Take a Break from Drinking, they all have really awesome podcasts.

I actually just have a ton of friends with podcasts because we’re all really awesome. But anyway, I asked around a little bit but you can’t really – it’s like asking somebody what’s it like to run a marathon? Well, they can tell you but you really need to experience it for yourself.

So I said fuck it, I’m just going to do it, jumped in with both feet, committed to doing weekly episodes. Inside I was like, oh shit, what if I can’t do it? But I was like, I know once people start listening, I’m going to have that accountability, I’m going to have to keep recording because I knew that you would be depending every single week on the episode dropping on Thursdays, so I couldn’t flake out. It was sort of the ultimate in accountability, and the more people listen, the more accountable I get.

So it’s like when you tell everyone you know that you’re going to do a marathon, you pretty much have to do it at that point because people are going to ask about your training and you don’t want to say, “Oh yeah, I totally gave up on that because it was too hard.” That’s no fun.

Telling other people about your big audacious goals means that there’s someone else checking in and then if you’re like me, you sure as fuck don’t want to give up on yourself when everyone is watching. And I actually had a conversation with somebody today in the Run Your Best Life coaching group and we were talking about – she said, “I’d like to run a marathon someday but I know my limits and I know I probably can’t do it so I just tell myself not to even bother.”

And I said, “You’re running your second half marathon now and a year ago that’s probably not something that was on your radar, so what happened to get you to run a half marathon? Because first you had to step up your brain to go from 5K to half marathon.” And she said, “Oh well, a bunch of other people were doing it and I said hey, I’ll do it too and I jumped in and started talking about it, and next thing I knew, everybody knew I was doing this thing and I kind of had no choice but to move forward.”

I mean, obviously we always have a choice, but in her brain she thought, I don’t have a choice because everybody knows and I don’t want to admit that I failed so I’m just going to keep going and doing it. So sometimes telling your people about those big audacious goals means that it’s more likely that you’re going to do it.

If you’re an obliger, if you followed the Gretchen Rubin Four Tendencies, I talked to her a few episodes ago, we talked all about the four tendencies and one of the personality tendencies is to be an obliger, which means that you’re not so likely to keep commitments to yourself but you always keep commitments to other people. So you can kind of hack into that tendency by telling other people about your stuff to keep you motivated.

 

But anyway, I decided to do this show. Really couldn’t imagine having five episodes done, much less 82, but here we are a little over a year later. I’ve gone through some barfy moments about like, oh my gosh, how am I going to get this done? But for the most part, I’ve managed to put out 82 episodes with not too much drama.

I’ve recorded over 60 hours of conversations and rants and life lessons and even a few running tips here and there, and I have learned a lot about myself and about big goals in the past year of recording. So I really want to share one of those lessons with you today. So I’m basically just going to distill it down into one quote and it’s not the prettiest quote I’ve ever given you. It’s not the most – doesn’t sound all that sexy, but here it is.

“Progress happens when you focus on the moment that you’re in. Progress happens when you put your energy into doing the best you can do on the task at hand, and when you stop thinking about how far you have to go and start thinking about the very next thing that you have to do.” So I did not set out to record 82 episodes. That was not on my radar.

I mean, I thought, maybe someday I’ll have 82 episodes. I think I thought maybe someday I’ll have 100 episodes and we’re going to party like it’s 1999 when we get to 100. But I didn’t set out to do that. I set out to do the three episodes I needed to launch. And then I focused on getting the next episode recorded after that.

So after we did the three, I was like, alright, the next thing I need to do is episode number four. Got episode number four done, I said okay, now the next thing I need to do is episode number five, and the next and the next. I did not think to myself, “Oh my god, how am I ever going to record 82 episodes?” I only thought to myself, “How can I record the next episode?”

And it’s really a game changer of a question because what it does is it gives me something I can do right now to move forward. And in a moment, I’m going to explain why our thinking can either move us forward or keep us stuck, but I know saying I’m just going to focus on the next thing, it seems obvious, right?

But what happens is most of us get really caught up in looking at the horizon with the project. And I always say when you’re actually running, I want you looking at the horizon. But when you are mentally focusing on what you are doing, I don’t want you to look at the horizon because when you’re looking at the horizon, you’re thinking, look how much I have to do, look how far I have to go, instead of looking at the very next thing on the list.

So what happens when we look at everything on our to-do list, and this could be any project that you have or it could be running, when we look at everything on the list or we look at the distance between where we are now and where we want to be, maybe if you’re trying to lose weight and you’re like, I need to lose 100 pounds, I have only lost two pounds, I have so far to go, like, that’s just such a defeating thought.

Or I want to – I’ve got a 10-mile training run and you’ve done a tenth of a mile, you’re like, oh my god, I’ve got so much farther to go. When we concentrate on that distance between where we are and where we want to be, we have these thoughts that create overwhelm and here’s the thing; when you feel overwhelmed, you do not take a lot of action.

So the feeling of overwhelm comes from your thinking. It comes from your thinking about how much you have to do and what you make that mean. You feel overwhelm and you don’t take a lot of action from that place. I know you’ve all been there. You come home, you’ve got a shit ton of things on your list and the first thing you do is flop onto the couch and watch Netflix.

You’re so overwhelmed at all the shit you have to do you’re like, no, no, I’m just going to watch Netflix instead, right? And so then what happens is now it’s like, three hours later and you have even less time and you still have the same amount of stuff to do, and then you’re panicking and you’re feeling awful and maybe you even say fuck it, I’m just going to watch Netflix for the rest of the night, I’ll deal with it all tomorrow.

Been there, done that. So, this feeling of overwhelm prevents us from taking action and then puts us even farther behind, but the feeling of overwhelm has nothing to do with everything that’s on your to-do list, has nothing to do with how far you have to go in your training run, and everything to do with what you’re thinking about it.

Circumstances, list of shit, circumstances, 12-mile training run. You have a bunch of thoughts about it that are, “Gosh, that’s so far, it’s going to take so long, there’s so many things to do.” When you think those thoughts, you feel overwhelmed. So I want to help you redirect into a place that’s going to pull away the overwhelm and allow you to actually move forward and take action.

So I see this situation all the time with my clients who are training for races, especially things like half marathons and marathons that take a matter of hours rather than a matter of like, 45 minutes to an hour. 13 miles is more than four times as far as a 5K, and what happens when you set that as a goal, like, it sounds super fun and it’s super exciting because you’re imagining being the person that has completed that goal, but then you start to realize like, oh, to be that person I actually have to do the thing. I have to do all the training runs.

And then you start to spin out. You’re like, how many training runs do I have to do and if it’s a half marathon, it’s like 50 training runs. How many hours you’re going to have to run. Well, it’s going to be – I can’t even do the math that fast in my head but it’s a lot. It’s many hours. It’s many miles. And along the way there’s a lot of chances to fail.

So, when my clients sign up for a half marathon or a marathon and they’re super excited about – when they put their brain into what it’s like to have achieved that goal, they’re excited, but then when they think about actually doing the work, they start to get overwhelmed because they’re imagining all of the trainings runs lined up in front of them.

And that can be kind of overwhelming. In fact, just even at the beginning of a long training run – and we all do this, I do this too – you have 12 miles on your schedule, you show up to the beginning of the trail, and the entire time you’re thinking, “Oh my god, 12 miles, it’s going to take forever. I’m going to be so bored. I’ll never make it. What if I don’t make it? What if I get injured? What if I have to pee? What if I get hungry? What if I run out of water?”

Like, what if, what if, what if. Does this sound familiar? So here’s the thing; when you’re thinking all of those thoughts to yourself at the beginning of a training run or the night before the training run because usually it doesn’t start when you show up to the trail. It starts hours before. When you’re thinking those thoughts, how do you show up for yourself? It’s not very enthusiastically, I would lay money on that.

And then every single mile you’re like, ugh, still have 10 miles to go. So, what’s going on, it’s nothing to do with the length of the training run and everything to do with how you are thinking about it. Your brain is thinking shitty thoughts about the circumstance of a 12-mile training run, and it’s creating a feeling of overwhelm, a feeling of resistance, maybe even resentment.

So we have to take those thoughts about that training run, we have to stop focusing on how far you have to go and take your brain and just look at what am I doing right now? Right fucking now. This is such an important skill for runners because running happens one mile at a time. It happens one interval at a time. One step at a time. A 5K is 3.1 miles, which is roughly 6000 individual steps. Maybe 6200, depending on your stride length. A half marathon is 13.1 miles or around 26,000 steps and a full marathon is around 52,000 steps.

So, you cannot run mile 13 before you run mile one. You have to run the mile you’re in, you have to run the interval you’re in, you have to take the step that’s in front of you before you can take the next one. So just focus on what’s right in front of you. 26,000 steps sounds like a lot for a half marathon, but if you just focus on the next step you need to take instead of how many you have left, that finish line is going to come a lot faster.

And I want you to think about using this as a mantra on your next run. Maybe it’s like, I can do anything for 30 seconds, or I’m running the mile I’m in, I just need to run this mile. I want you to come up with a mantra around that so that you can take the focus off of the end of your run and put it right onto what you’re doing right now, taking the next step, running the next interval, finishing the next mile the absolute best way you can do it.

That’s your assignment for this week. Now, as I mentioned in the very beginning of this episode, which wasn’t too long ago. This was actually a pretty fast episode. We’re celebrating the one-year anniversary of the show about six weeks late, but we’re still going to celebrate because we’re not perfect here at Not Your Average Runner, but we definitely celebrate our wins.

So here’s the deal. I have a 2019 runner’s calendar from Ilovetorun.org and this is that super cool calendar that was going around in January. It’s got – it’s one of those calendars where you mark off every single day that you ran, or you could just use it for working out in general, whatever you want. And then each day, each day has a tiny little cartoon person on it. Every single day is different.

Some of them look like celebrities to me. I was looking at it the other day like that looks like Jerry Seinfeld, which actually it probably is. There’s at least one of them that’s Jerry Seinfeld because it was his idea. This calendar I think was something to do with the way he writes his comedy is how they came up with the idea for this calendar.

But anyway, now I know it’s March but if you’re like me, you track your workouts obsessively and you can easily go back and just fill in the first few months. So we’re going to do this giveaway, I’m going to send you this calendar. It’s going to be – you’re going to have to go and sort of retroactively fill in a couple months but then you’ve got the rest of the year to fill it out and it’s super fun.

It’s a really nice poster. It’s the white background one and here’s how you can win it. So what you need to do is post on Instagram – I’m not going to be looking on Facebook because it’s really hard to track it over there. You got to do this on Instagram. If you don’t have an Instagram account, go set one up for Pete’s sake and then follow me because I’m awesome.

I do some really cool shit, I put it on Instagram, and you should just be following it. So just go do that. Anyway, post about your favorite Not Your Average Runner podcast episode on Instagram including why that episode was so meaningful to you. So I want you to make that post and then you’re going to tag @notyouraveragerunner. You’ve got to tag me or I won’t know you posted it.

So you have to – not just a hashtag. Hashtags are awesome but you got to tag @notyouraveragerunner and then also, invite people to subscribe to the podcast. Share the love because here’s the thing; the more people that listen, the more we get those million more women up and running. So share the love.

Okay, now you have until March 22nd to do this and then I’m going to pick one entry at random and I’m going to DM you. I’ll send you a message on Instagram to get your mailing address. So again, you have to be on Instagram to do this. And I’m sorry if you’re not on Instagram but that’s how it’s going to go because I’m making the rules here.

Anyway, that’s it. Share the podcast, share your favorite episode, why it was meaningful to you, tag @notyouraveragerunner, invite people to subscribe and you’ll be in the running to win a cool running poster.

Alright rebels, that is it for this week. I’ll tell you what, I have a cold, it’s been going on a week. My voice is running out, which is why we’re doing a short episode and you’re probably tired of hearing me talk with my voice cracking so we’re done. Everything I mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes at notyouraveragerunner.com/82 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.