More often than I would like to admit, I often find myself in this situation:
Friday Me: It is Friday, the weekend is coming, time is unlimited and I AM GOING TO DO ALL THE THINGS! Oh how I shall catch up on sleep, I’ll spend hours on the trails, get to a yoga class, go for a climb, sneak in a XC ski, catch up with girlfriends over coffee. I even brought my work laptop home so I can catch up on work with ALL MY FREE TIME! I’m going to finish knitting my hat. finally do my taxes, cook up something tasty AF in the slow cooker and just enjoy doing “nothing”.
Sunday Me: It is Sunday evening. The number of tangible things I have completed is 0.
Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration. First of all, I almost ALWAYS find time to get out for a run on the weekend, particularly in winter when the weekend may be the only time of the week I can schedule a run in daylight. It’s also something I genuinely enjoy doing and look forward to, so checking that one off the list isn’t REALLY ever a challenge (except when its minus stupid degrees out, in which case I still usually get er’ done). And hey, I usually check another thing or two off of that list. Sometimes I even have one of those magically productive weekends where “there must have been something in the coffee” and I get an impressive amount of things done. But more often than not, I find myself double, triple or even quadruple scheduling myself. Interestingly enough, the amount of time I waste seems to be directly proportional to how many different things I pile on my to-do list, which is inversely proportional to my “getting shit done” ratio. And I’m always left wondering what the hell happened to my epic plans for adventure, relaxing, and getting-on-top-of-shit each week.
I believe it is possible to get an extraordinary amount of stuff done in what may seem like a limited amount of time. I mean, I feel like this is sort of a prerequisite for running ultras. It’s probably the same amnesia that masks any unpleasantness experienced during an ultra (causing us to do things we would “never do again”) that I experience each week in my work and just general life. I always either take on too much, focus too little, or both.
I find myself falling into similar traps at work. I want to be the yes woman and a huge motivational factor for me is knowing that the workload on my plate is borderline unachievable. I don’t just subject, but throw myself into projects, roles or tasks that I know will be hard, and then curse myself when I am in the throngs of that stressful meeting or project deployment. The anxious, clenching feeling in my gut, the stress that keeps me up at night is strikingly similar to the pangs of regret I feel in the back half of a 100 or 50 miler. The question is exactly the same: why the flying fuck did I put myself in this situation, again.
Because I believe I can handle it. And I don’t just believe I can handle it, I believe I can get better at it. I used to think that succeeding as a runner meant training my body so that on race day, it feels easy, and I would be so fit that I could achieve my goal without having to work hard on the big day. I remember dejectedly saying to a friend last year, after failing to qualify for Boston as hoped at the Vancouver Marathon, that I didn’t believe I could run a sub 3:30 marathon time until I was actually fit enough to run a 3:20 marathon, because I could never harness whatever fitness I had to push through a pace that felt hard during a race. I’ve chased after visions of perfection at work too, believing that I can plan and execute a project so flawlessly and precisely that any stress on the deployment or go-live day can be avoided altogether. Success, to me, meant reaching my goal without breaking a proverbial sweat. Having achieved this “success” in various situations, I can now confirm that it is bullshit and offers up almost none of the value or satisfaction I crave.
My recrafted definition of success is achieving the absolute most you can with the resources you have, which means that it will be difficult, otherwise you could have done more. It’s knowing that you had to work very hard through each step, training session or deliverable, right up to the last minute, and you STILL got it done. What’s the most important ingredient to help you maximize your fitness, your abilities, your time, your resources? I think it’s unwavering focus. Something of which, as I am becoming painfully aware, that I have about as much of as a 7-year old in a playroom full of puppies, glitter and candy.
It’s so hard for me to focus. I want to impress myself with how much I can accomplish. I think I want to impress others too, but I definitely want to impress myself. Because of this, I think I take on a “more is more” approach and constantly cram too many things onto my “list”, sabotaging myself and keeping myself from doing things well, or really completing things to the best of my ability. I am learning to find value in “less is more” and following through on fewer things with 100% effort and attention, rather than half-assing a multitude of endeavours.
I am organized but sometimes I drop the ball. I know how to manage my time, but I often piss it away. I can handle a lot of stress, but I occasionally full on FREAK OUT. I can work hard, but sometimes I am a lazy sloth. I set realistic goals and don’t always create plans to achieve them. I can push my body to the limit when it counts, but I’m not always willing to. I can accomplish a lot, (We all can!!!!) but I don’t always do it. Obbbbbbviously no one is perfect or operating at 100% efficiency all of the time (I mean, good for you if you are but I kind of hate you). I think if I can learn to focus more, some crazy good stuff will unfold.
I’m working to catch myself and change my behaviour when I notice that I’m not focusing. Instead of having seventeen email windows open at once at work, bouncing between each one, typing a line, thinking-of-a-new-idea-which-I-then-go-and-investigate-for-40-minutes-before-coming-back-and-trying-to-remember-what-the-fuck-I-was-writing, I’m trying to finish one and send it before starting another. If I’m at home cleaning the house, I do things like fold half the laundry, then go wash two dishes, vacuum one room and then suddenly, I have a clusterfuck of half-done things and feel like I have gotten nowhere. Liz, NO. Just hang up the clothes and DONT YOU DARE THROW THEM BACK ON THE FLOOR. Why is it so hard to just FINISH something?
The number one threat to my focus is the palm-sized encapsulation of evil known as my cell-phone. I watched a documentary that says the average person looks at their phone 170 times per day. That is fucked. My boss talks about “thrashing” in a computer-science related sense, which (as Wikipedia will tell you) is:
“when a computer’s virtual memory subsystem is in a constant state of paging, rapidly exchanging data in memory for data on disk, to the exclusion of most application-level processing. This causes the performance of the computer to degrade or collapse.”
Well, nothing causes my performance to degrade or collapse more than the, approximate, half BILLION times a day I needlessly look at my phone. At the risk of aging myself several decades, it depresses me how peoples phones hold them prisoner and almost constantly distract them from whatever they are doing. Remember when “watch a movie” meant, to actually sit and watch the movie? Now watching a movie seems to mean: sit on the couch playing with ours phones together while a movie plays on the TV. Extra points if anyone in the room can explain what even happened in the previous 10 minutes, or name the movie. It grosses me out to see people walking down the street with their gaze fixed to their little screen. Or to be at a party or restaurant, a social environment, where it is now somehow socially acceptable to ignore or interrupt each other to look at our phones instead. You know that big list of stuff I listed at the top of this post? I bet I could get most of it done in a weekend if I didn’t waste hours doddling on my silly little Samsung. When I say “people”, I mean me too. I’m guilty of all of the above offences, though I am trying to become much less of a repeat offender.
My best night out with friends is when I leave my phone in my coat pocket at the door. I laugh harder when I actually catch the jokes in the movie I watch, because I’m paying attention. I am WAY more productive at work when my cell goes in my desk drawer and its not sitting there, staring at me with its beady little android eyes. I love Instagram, Facebook and Strava as much as the next person and I don’t want to cut myself off socially, because I do get value out of the social connection these channels bring me. Social media is a great tool, if you can compartmentalize it and like all things, use it in moderation. But I am sick of letting it take value away from the other stuff, so I’m trying to designate time to waste on this little screen every day, and the rest of the time, put that thing away, so that I can focus on everything else. It’s important to enjoy and experience everything else going on. Plus, if Justin Timberlake ever appears beside ME at the Superbowl, I’m going to look at his actual face instead of trying to snapchat him through my fucking phone.
This blog took a bit more of a ranty turn than I expected, so if you made it through that, thank you! I should probably go back to the whole running thing now. I am really excited to apply my newly redefined idea of success, and my mission to focus, to myself as a runner. Even though I was “less fit” than other times I’ve tried to run a Boston Qualifying time, I finally ran a BQ at the Hamilton Marathon (my 21st attempt at a BQ marathon), and ran a 3:30:02. (Now that I am, you know, an expert, I’m thinking of writing a guide on “How to qualify for the Boston Marathon in 21 tries or less”, stay tuned). I assure you I was not fit enough to run a 3:20, I’ve just started to learn that I am willing to be uncomfortable and actually wanting to work hard to reach a goal. I felt like I was on to something.
A few days later, I reached out to Myke Labelle for some coaching with Coastline Endurance, and have been working with him since November to prep for my first race of the season which is *GASP* TOMORROW! I’ll be running the Black Canyon 100km just outside Phoenix, Arizona. It’s been an adjustment to follow a plan devised by someone else and at first I didn’t like it. I wanted to do the workouts and see the paces that gave me instant gratification, even if that wasn’t the best way to train for this distance. I wanted to see the speed and results on strava that boosted my ego and told me I was fast, but I stuck with it and I’m really glad I did. I’m signed up for fewer races this year because I don’t want to just finish them, I want to do the best that I can. I think I signed up for so many races before because I was scared to really have goal races, to put all of my eggs in one basket and aim to do my very best. If I sucked it didn’t matter, because there would be so many more! But it kept me from asking more of myself, and that’s pretty lame.
I’m doing a lot more easy running and have been prescribed some things I never would have thought of for myself, and I like it. I feel like this is the most focused and specific training I’ve done for a race and I have a goal to go out to each event I run this year and really push myself. I might totally blow up, but that’s totally okay with me because I’m going to have A goals, B goals, and even Z goals if I have to get things done. My A goal for Black Canyon is 12 hours, which I think might be insanely aggressive. If I realize it is during the race that’s okay, because B goal is to finish under 12.5 hours. C goal is to finish under 13 hours and so on. I do hope that I finish under 17 hours so that I can use it as a Western States qualifier. Z goal is probably just trying not to fall on a cactus but you know what, even if that happens Ill just adjust my goal to try not to fall on a cactus twice. No matter what, I’m not going to throw in the towel like a sissy if my ego is bruised and I realize I was way off on my “best case scenario” goal. It’s still going to be worth it to try for a half hour, or hour, or 5 hours slower. Wish me luck!
This one time I went running 