New Year: Living Your Personal Best

Running can be a big goal-oriented numbers game, pushing for that next PR. That certainly is how I began my training cycle leading to CIM. I did not just want a personal record, I wanted a moonshot qualifying time for Boston. I was determined, focused, and coached, … and then as the weeks passed I was diverted by travel, an injury, and a series of work deadlines that in combination left me questioning everything about the race including my motivation, commitment, and whether I even had it in me to finish. Vanished were my dreams of a massive PR, replaced instead with simple resolve to go out and just do my best, My Personal Best, given where I found myself in the moment.

Functionally, a Personal Record is the same as a Personal Best. They simply represent your best time or performance in a given distance. But conceptually, I believe them to be distinct. When I approached the CIM start line, it was too much for me to think about a time goal or PR. At the start and again and again during the race, my focus instead was simply on this: doing my personal best. In that moment, in that mile, am I pushing myself to be my best self? To stretch beyond what is comfortable? To embrace all of the lessons that this experience offers? To do everything I can to ensure that when I get to the finish line I can turn around and know with absolute certainty that on that day I left everything I had to offer out on the course. On CIM race day, I let go of the hard numbers and embraced the mantra of running the best race that I could.

As it turned out, on that particular day, my Personal Best was, indeed, my Personal Record. By nearly 13 minutes over 26.2 miles.

I wonder, had I focused on a particular finish time on that day instead of a commitment to do my best in the moment, would I have enjoyed the same result? With almost total certainty, no. By mile 18, my mile splits were slipping and any original goal time started to move from illusive to impossible. If I was stuck on the numbers when my body and mind were exhausted, would I have had it in me to resist the temptation to just say “fuck it”, give up, and just coast in the rest of the way? Doubtful.

But, having let go of the numbers at the start, what I did have that day was the ability to check in with my body, in the moment, almost every moment, throughout the race. What do I have in me? What downhill can I push, what crowd can I feed off of, what nutrition can I offer my body to refuel? Run steady, run forward, run to your full ability with everything your body has to give in that moment.

Run your personal best.

And I did.

In the weeks since the race, I have thought a lot about the experience and, as we move into the New Year, about lessons I can glean from it as I work on goal setting for 2018. Historically, I have focused on concrete resolutions that, in large part, can be objectively measured either as a success or failure. There is the time-honored favorite of “lose ### pounds”, or exercise ### days a week, run a (insert time goal here) 10k or marathon, write ### posts or articles per month, bill ### hours per year. In so many respects, the numbers game serves an important role, giving us concrete goals to shoot for and decreasing the temptation to negotiate against yourself for a better (easier) option. But if those fixed goals start to slip away, and success in hitting numerical targets starts to feel impossible, what then? You are left with fighting feelings of failure that come with falling short and that, surely, is both counterproductive and destructive.

I still have big, aspirational goals, but in 2018, my focus is on process and committing myself to living my personal best with everything that I have to bring to bear in the moment. Running goals will expand to include an equal concentration on nutrition, balance, cross training, and mental training – things that are more intangible than the pace-and-miles numbers game, but are essential if I am to improve. As in running, so in life, my guiding principle in 2018 will be to do those things that represent my personal best effort toward any given goal. Success is embedded in the process of committing, daily, to maximizing the moment that I am in. And then doing it again and again so that in the end I can turn around and say, with confidence …

I have lived my personal best.

WelcomE!

The obligatory "about me" ...

I am a California attorney, wife and mother to two teenagers. Thanks to some fierce prodding by my brother and unwavering support from my family, I started to write again (hence, the blog), and to run again (training for the New York City Marathon). After all, if you are going to get in the game, you might as well go all-in. You can find out more about my story here.

November 1, 2019

This Is Fifty

When I first started this writing space and was trying on different names for what ultimately became Midlife Run, I struggled. Solidly in my forties, the idea of attaching the word “midlife” to anything seemed like an unwelcome, uncomfortable stretch reserved for the after-fifty set. But I settled into the name, comforted by the knowledge that I was on the “early side” of midlife. Not so any more. Last month we dropped our youngest at college thus marking the beginning of the “empty nester years” and today, as I start to write this, I turn fifty. I am solidly, undeniably, in midlife.

August 19, 2019

It's Almost Here: The Empty Nest!

In my memory, I cannot think of a more seismic shift in our marriage than when we had children. The first sign that our world was about to be rocked actually happened when our first bun was still in the oven and we were standing outside of a Denver bar. It wasn’t late, we were with good friends, and good times were being had by all, especially by those (not me) enjoying a night of craft beer and pool. By that point in my pregnancy, my body was changing and bulging, I had given up caffeine, alcohol, and hot baths and traded them for binge-eating apples. My pregnancy and impending motherhood were feeling tangibly real in a way that it wasn’t (yet) for my husband. And that night, with festivities just warming up, I was standing by the car asking my husband not to go in and to come home with me instead because I was exhausted and sick with pregnancy. If you ask him now, he doesn’t remember that night. I do. In his eyes and in his body-language was a man coming to terms with our new and changing reality. As we looked at each other we silently acknowledged that our lives would never be the same. What we want, what we do, how we see the world, and how we prioritize our lives no longer involved just the two of us. There was going to be a third member of our family, and eventually a fourth, and nothing, ever, not even a night out with friends, would be quite so simple any more.

May 20, 2019

Lucky Me (Guest Post by Andrew J. Pridgen)

My excuses for why I’m not going to perform well in a race while I toe the starting line roll up like opening credits in a movie. Written by: Lack of preparation, Directed by: Insecurity, Executive produced by: My shoes don’t feel right, Casting by: I can barely breathe and my ankle already hurts. Starring: Me.

April 3, 2019

Walk Slowly with Me

Our family is not one to stand still. We fall easily into the pace of rushed crowds on New York City streets, and we barrel ahead in pursuit of goals. We move forward, and then we move forward again. Even our family walks seem to be driven, marching along familiar neighborhood paths, distracted by conversation, and, for the past twelve years, led by our trusty furry companion, Lucy, whose entry into our family was the very thing that initiated this nightly routine.

January 13, 2019

New Year's Resolution: Do One Thing

I have a shrink-wrapped cork board leaning against the wall to the right of my desk, clearly within view. It’s been standing sentinel in the same spot for months, waiting for me to deal with it and daring me to get on with it already. Its purpose is to be a vision board of sort, a place for me organize my goals, to lay them out in a way that my left-leaning brain can process and check them off, mixed together with other bits designed to spark my still developing right-brain to creativity. I look at that cork board regularly with the same dread that someone with writer’s block stares at a blinking curser on a blank screen.

December 9, 2018

NYC Marathon: Challenge, Growth, and Celebration

When you tell someone – especially a non-runner someone – that you are going to run a marathon, you’re generally met with some version of a respectful “that’s great … good for you.” Contrast, when you tell someone that you are going to run the NYC Marathon, there’s a special, heightened aura that surrounds what surely, inevitably, will be nothing short of an epic race.

November 3, 2018

Life’s a Journey ... The Road to NYC Marathon 2018

Mostly, though, there has been an extraordinarily emotional undercurrent to this training cycle because it is impossible for me to look forward to this marathon without looking back to my 2015 NYC Marathon, and examining with wonder how one stacked series of events can make your whole life pivot until you find yourself on a trajectory you never could have imagined.

September 15, 2018

Creating Space, Building Strength

In my ordinary life, there is room for writing, for running, for meaningful conversations, and for balance. My life right now is not ordinary. It is frenetic, and it is all but consumed by a single work endeavor. It leaves me starving for sleep and time with family, it led me to write a middle of the night SOS to my coach about my NYC marathon training, and it is accompanied by a level of stress and adrenaline that can keep me going now, but in the long run is unsustainable. Gratefully, I am not alone in this experience, and I have my ultimate support crew (husband and family) behind me.

June 27, 2018

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff Because There Will Be Plenty of Big Stuff: Reflections on 25 Years of Marriage

Certain milestones simply make me pause. Today is a big one – our 25th wedding anniversary. By any measure, that is a legitimately long time to spend marching through life next to the same person. It has me looking back in wonder about how we got to this point, looking forward trying to guess what is ahead, and reflecting broadly about what I know now about the two of us together and the life-long project of building a marriage. Unsurprisingly, I have a few thoughts.

March 29, 2018

That Family Place

When my Dad was young, the annual family pilgrimage took them to Lake Tahoe during the summer, where his family would stay in a small cabin on the north shore, the boys would catch crawdads between the boulders jutting out from the Lake, and skip smooth, flat rocks over the water’s surface. I know these things because when my parents took my brother and me to the same lake shore, and years later after the next generation joined us, my parents would tell the stories. The connection to Lake Tahoe is now four generations deep, and with every new year and new family member or friend who joins us, the memories deepen and years of family stories from this special place transform into epic lore.