The tag line for this website is "The courage to start," which is the title of a wonderful book by John Bingham. Bingham has had a regular column in Runners World magazine for years and is a running enthusiast who goes by the nickname "The Penguin” because his running pace is so slow. As motivating useful as it is to think of the courage to start, what really makes the difference is the decision to keep going, or, put differently, to not stop.
When a race gets really hard, as happened at Pinehurst International with a hilly run course, I kept saying to myself, “all you have to do is not stop.” I knew that if i just didn’t stop, I would get to the finish line. That same rule, which applies to individual races, also applies to a training session, a training block, a training year and to life. 2017 has been a frustrating year. Every month, it seems, I had some minor, yet totally debilitating injury that impeded my ability to move forward with my racing goals. Month by month, another planned and paid for race dropped off the calendar until the entire race year was reduced to one sprint triathlon in August. In prior years, when I was still on the couch making furtive efforts to get up and get active, even a month or two like I had this year would have finished me. I would have given up and retreated into the comfort, loneliness and isolation of the couch. But this time, I didn’t stop. I didn’t have the year I had planned and the year that I expected, but I kept on doing what I could do every week. There were some pretty dismal weeks when my Training Peaks was much more red blocks than green. But there were no weeks with all red, and there were some good 4-8 week blocks that were all green and whether it was yoga, cycling or a crazy rope-climbing contraption at the gym, I did something every week. Even on the bad weeks I never stopped. And that was key.
Now what the hey is this contraption?
When I was on the run course at IRONMAN 70.3 North Carolina in October 2016, I hurt a lot. The string headwinds on the bike course took a lot out of my legs so when I started the run sometime in hour five of the race, I was already hurting. On the middle seven miles in Greenfield Park, I was pretty deep in the pain cave. But I kept repeating to myself my mantra from Pinehurst International back in May: “All you have to do is not stop.” And I didn’t. And I eventually turned down to the finishing chute and finished the race. This year, under very different circumstances, with no external rewards and no events and no crowds and no volunteers and no cheering, I had to repeat that same mantra. And it carried me through some pretty dark times this year.
It isn’t always easy to not stop. Sometimes stopping is all you want to do and every particular time that the opportunity to get up off the couch presents itself. But, like most things about staying off the couch, while it isn’t always easy it is always simple. All you have to do is just not stop.