We all have terrible runs, myself included. We start out excited or maybe we start out dreading it, but then a whole myriad of things happen that make us just want to quit. Sometimes your breathing is off, or a weird pain surfaces and your inner mean girl has a lot to say about it.
I used to tell my clients that this was just part of the deal. Being a real runner means having some shitty runs sometimes. What I’m sharing on the podcast with you this week is how, actually, you can have an amazing run every single time you get out there. Terrible runs can be a thing of the past if you want, and I’m talking you through it today.
Tune in if you want to have awesome runs every time, no matter how long the distance! This is obviously going to take lots of practice, but doubling down and taking care of yourself will lead to better results.
If you want help with creating new ways of thinking about your runs, go ahead and sign up for Run Your Best Life! We practice it every single day in that group, so get in there to start feeling great about all your runs!
What You’ll Learn From this Episode:
- What actually makes a run feel terrible.
- The types of actions we take when we’re feeling frustrated, discouraged, or disappointed.
- Why believing a run was terrible doesn’t serve you.
- What you can do instead of thinking you had a shitty run.
- Why pain or pleasure is not a circumstance.
- How you can have an amazing run every time you get out there.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
- If you have any questions you’d like answered on the show, email me at podcast@notyouraveragerunner.com
- Join the Not Your Average Runner Private Facebook Community
- Join Run Your Best Life to get exclusive content from a podcast accessible just for members!
- Not Your Average Runner Instagram
- Ep #33: How to Coach Yourself
- Savannah Rock n Roll half marathon
Full Episode Transcript:
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.
Jill: Hey rebels, you are listening to episode number 95 of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. I’m your host, Jill Angie, and today we are talking about terrible, no good, awful, shitty runs and what to do when they happen. And I mean, we’ve all been there, right? Some of you more than others.
Sometimes you just head out the door, super excited to go for your run, best of intentions, but you cannot get into a groove, or sometimes you start out and it feels amazing, and then it goes south after a few miles. Or maybe you just start out in a bad mood and it gets worse from there. Whatever it is, sometimes your breathing is off or there’s a weird pain in your foot or your bra strap is chafing you or you’re a minute per mile slower than usual despite working really, really hard and your inner mean girl is just screaming in your ear about all of it.
And this may lead to quitting early, or you might suffer through it and then feel really defeated because isn’t running supposed to get easier and not harder? And we create so much drama in our minds after a run like that, thinking it’s not fair, we’ve been working so hard, when is it going to get easier, why am I getting slower? Maybe I should just fucking quit.
And I’ll be honest, rebels, it happens to me from time to time as well. I mean, it happens to everyone. And what I used to tell my clients when they would come to me saying, “I had a terrible run and it was awful,” I’d say hey, some runs are awesome and some runs just suck. It’s part of the deal. Congratulations, this makes you a real runner.
But while I was running last week and I was having one of those runs where I actually felt pretty good for the first couple of miles but then in the third mile I started just feeling really kind of tired and out of breath and my head – I was feeling a little bit lightheaded and looking back, I realize I was probably dehydrated, but my brain was just like, this is awful, I’m never going to finish the marathon. It was crazy the places my brain went to.
And I think what actually makes a run terrible is different than what we think, but our thinking about the run has a huge effect on our performance. So in this run where I was kind of thinking, thinking, thinking as usual, I was slogging along, I was counting the minutes until I could be done and it hit me so hard that a terrible run isn’t actually a circumstance. It is not a fact. It is simply a thought.
And rebels, like, in all my years of life coaching, of working on managing my thoughts, of really doing all of the mind work that I do, it literally never occurred to me that a terrible run is just a thought in my mind. And now, for sure I can feel some of you saying that’s total bullshit. A terrible run is actually a fact and you’re ready to fight me for saying a bad run is all in your head.
But you guys, it kind of is. So just stick with me a little bit. Let’s break it down. The facts of your run look something like this. You ran from point A to point B and it took you x minutes to do it. That’s data. You had sensations in your body and you had thoughts in your brain. Everything else is your thinking and I mean everything.
Your opinion about that collection of facts that I just gave you might be that it was a terrible run, it might be that it was an awesome run, or it might be somewhere in between. But it is still just an opinion. And opinions create feelings or emotions in our bodies, and those emotions drive our actions. We talked about this a million times, but if you’re new to my podcast and you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out episode 33, How to Coach Yourself.
So the great thing about opinions is that you can change them if they’re not working for you. Now, stay with me here because if you can get your head around this concept, it really, really is a game-changer. Now, when you think the thought, “That was a terrible run,” how do you feel? Most likely you feel frustrated or discouraged or disappointed, right? And when you feel that way, when you have those emotions, how do you show up for yourself?
Do you take really good care of your body? Maybe eating an extra nutritious lunch or going to bed early? Or do you complain about it to your friends? Do you feel sorry for yourself? So you feel pissed off? Maybe you have an extra glass of wine with dinner to make yourself feel better about your terrible run.
My guess is it’s the latter of those two options because when we feel frustrated or discouraged or disappointed, we don’t double down on our self-care. Honestly, we just don’t do it. When we feel frustrated, discouraged, or disappointed, we don’t double down on self-care. We want to avoid feeling frustrated, discouraged, and disappointed. Nobody likes to feel that way, and wine is really great for that, at least in the short term, in the few moments when you’re drinking.
So is online shopping and Facebook. Self-care doesn’t usually give us that immediate hit of relief from those feelings. We need a big distraction. So we drink wine or we overeat cupcakes or we go online and we go shopping and we Facebook, we watch Netflix. We don’t allow ourselves to just feel those feelings.
So when you think you’ve had a terrible run, when you decide that that’s my opinion about the experience I just had, you don’t feel so good about it. You feel frustrated, you feel discouraged, you feel disappointed, and then you don’t act the way you want to. Our thoughts create our emotions and our emotions drive our actions.
In other words, how you think determines how you show up for yourself. So even if we could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that your run sucked balls, thinking about it that way, ascribing that opinion to it doesn’t really help you because it doesn’t drive you to become the best version of yourself. And I really want you to hear me here. Even if it’s true that you had a shitty run, how does it help you to believe that?
Because if your thoughts create your emotions and your emotions drive your actions, if you’re having thoughts that you had a shitty run, your emotions of frustration are going to drive actions of wanting to avoid that feeling. They’re not going to drive the action of taking extra good care of yourself so that your next run is better.
So what are you supposed to do instead of thinking you had a shitty run? What are the options? Well, in my mind, let’s just stop judging our runs completely. Just stop labeling them as good or bad. Stop making them mean anything about you, that you’re getting better or that you’re getting worse, just stop judging.
And if the circumstances are that you ran from point A to point B in x minutes and you had sensations in your body, and by sensations I mean things that you might label as pain, things that you might label as pleasure, whatever you label those sensations. And by the way, let me just take a little detour here from what I was going to say next.
The sensations that you have in your body, that’s the data. That’s the circumstance. Your nerves sent electrical impulses to the next nerve in the chain and the next nerve in the chain, and those electrical impulses maybe from your legs ended up in your brain and your brain then says okay, this is pain, this is pleasure, or whatever other category it wants to put those sensations in.
So the circumstance here, you guys, is the nerves in your body firing. You decide whether it is painful or pleasurable. And usually when we decide something is painful, we say that’s bad, and for good reason. If you break your leg and your brain does not register those neural impulses as pain, you might walk around on your broken leg and further cause damage.
So I’m not saying that it’s bad, that it’s not a good idea to label something as pain, but I want you to be aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the reason I know that sensations can be labeled differently is because there are people out there that seek sensations that other people might consider painful because they experience them as pleasurable.
So the neural firing, the neurons firing the electrical impulses zipping around your body are the circumstance and your assessment of that is what is a thought. So pain and pleasure, I want to put it out there that that is not actually a circumstance. That is a thought. It is your brain evaluating the biology and saying this is pain and when I feel pain, this is what I’m going to do about it.
So I think that’s a really powerful thing to understand and it doesn’t mean that you don’t continue to take certain sensations and register them as pain. I’m not saying that at all. I’m just saying when we think that pain itself is the circumstance, then we go to some places in our mind, which is like, this is terrible, I’m failing, and when in reality it’s like, okay I’m just experiencing pain, I wonder what’s going on.
So anyway, let’s go back to the point I was about to make, which is if the circumstances are that you ran from A to B in x minutes and you had sensations in your body, take a look at what you make all of that mean. Do you make it mean that there is a problem? Do you make it mean that something has gone wrong?
And if so, if you’re making that mean this is not right, something’s gone wrong, I want you to know that the problem is actually not that you were tired while you were running or that your breathing was uneven or that your legs hurt. The problem is that you are getting all Judgy McWhiney about it. That is the problem.
And you heard me, I just said that so stop it. We believe as humans that we are entitled to have every run feel amazing. We’re like, I’m a runner so therefore it should always feel amazing. And yes, I am including myself in that category. And we certainly are entitled to have every run feel amazing, but not in the way that you think.
Every run has the potential to be amazing, even if your legs were tired or your inner mean girl wouldn’t shut up or your breathing was ragged. Every run has the potential to be amazing because an amazing run is also just a thought. You guys, let that really sink in. If a terrible run is a thought, then an amazing run must also be a thought.
And if you can decide a run is amazing, that is super powerful. Terrible run, amazing run, different opinions about the same circumstance. So what if you decided that your run was awesome simply because you got out there and ran? That whatever your definition of an awesome run is is just I went running today. Or because you showed the fuck up for yourself, and by the way, we’re making t-shirts out of that.
If you’re in Run Your Best Life, you know that we are making t-shirts that said I showed the fuck up for myself today. Anyway, you can have an amazing run because you did something that most people think you shouldn’t be doing, or because you did it even though it was hard. An awesome run doesn’t have anything to do with your pace or whether you were tired or your legs hurt or anything like that. How fucking fun would that be?
So, judging your runs as good or bad is not super helpful, but if you’re going to do it, let’s just decide to call them all amazing and find reasons that they were amazing. Because believing that you had a terrible run is not serving you. An amazing run is literally just a thought away. So do the work on your thoughts, my friends.
Stop letting that habitual thinking run the show. You are in charge here so act like it, okay? And let me tell you, this is an art form, but it is definitely worth the time and effort because it’s very freeing. When you can let go of the drama and just get your ass out there and run, it is powerful. When you don’t have to worry about what does it mean when you have a terrible run, you can just keep running. You can keep enjoying yourself.
And it doesn’t mean that you go out there and every run is your fastest run or that your legs feel light and airy on every single run. I’m not saying those sensations go away. I’m saying you can stop making them mean that the whole world is falling.
We’ve been working hard on this, on the podcast for sure, just the thought work that we’ve been doing, but also in Run Your Best Life. For the past few weeks, we’ve been hitting really hard on thought work. And I’m not kidding, this concept of a terrible run, it really does happen to everybody and my goal for the clients in Run Your Best Life, for the members there is I want them all to have the skills to stop beating themselves up when their run doesn’t go as planned.
Not in a Pollyanna, Lego movie everything is awesome kind of way, but being able to neutralize that negative thinking so that they can stop derailing themselves and just move forward. And maybe even see the positives in a run where their body didn’t feel great.
So if you want help with that and honestly, everybody needs help with this because we’re human, this is how our brains work. If you want help with creating new ways of thinking about your running, go ahead and sign up for Run Your Best Life so you can learn how to do it. We practice it, you guys. Every day we practice it.
We are also doing a whole month focused just on running fuel in June as prep for our half marathon course that kicks off in July. And I highly recommend that you just get in on that course, get in on the fueling stuff that we’re doing right now so you can start trying all the fueling strategies we’re teaching and you kind of have a little bit of a leg up when you join the half marathon course.
So chef Jen, coach Jen is even creating some recipes just for the Run Your Best Life crew that are not even published in her cookbooks. These are exclusives, my friends. So there’s a lot of great stuff going on right now in Run Your Best Life. Make sure you get in the group as soon as possible to take advantage of everything.
You can sign up at runyourbestlife.com. Stop having shitty runs. Let’s just decide that you’re done with that. Join Run Your Best Life at runyourbestlife.com and stop having shitty runs and learn some new recipes for fuel, learn how to make your own, learn the best stuff to eat while you’re running so that you don’t have to poop when you’re three miles in and your stomach starts to hurt.
That’s a lot of that – not a lot. Most of that has to do with what you’re eating before, during, and after your run. So join Run Your Best Life in June right now and you’ll learn all about that and then you’ll be all set to start half marathon training with us in July. Oh, and by the way, that July training that kicks off has everyone ready for a half marathon the first week in November, which is coincidentally the Savannah Rock n Roll half marathon weekend.
So we are doing a whole Run Your Best Life retreat around that weekend. So we’re going to gather for the two days before the races and do some really awesome fun stuff. And so if you want to be part of that retreat, you got to be part of Run Your Best Life. There is no outsiders allowed. So there’s just so much good shit coming up in this group, you guys. I can’t even tell you how awesome it is.
So sign up at runyourbestlife.com. Stop having shitty runs, learn how to fuel yourself, train for a half marathon. Come to Savannah with us and hug all your running sisters in person and just do it. Just go do it. It will be easier if you just do it and then you’ll understand why I’m talking about it all the time.
Okay rebels, that’s it for this week. You can find the transcript of this show and everything we talked about at notyouraveragerunner.com/95 and I will talk to you 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.
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