This weekend I had a breakthrough.
Running has always been a weak point in my overall “fitness game”. I just never enjoyed it and would rather do almost anything than go for a run. I’ll workout and lift weights every single day, and I even enjoy cycling outside but running just was never my thing.
Over the last couple years I tried to incorporate more running into my training programs. Strength training was still my priority, but I started trying to add more running into my “off days”. So if I lifted 3-4 days/week I would add some form of running 1-2 days per week.
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The Challenge
The problem was that I wasn’t super consistent because I just didn’t enjoy it and I felt like I sucked at it. I mean, I’m a guy who is in pretty decent shape, fairly strong and lives fitness everyday but for some reason I just couldn’t get better at running. I could never find that magical “runner’s high” that every avid runner talks about.
Nonetheless I kept trying. Even when I would get pretty bad pain on the outside of my knee and hip during my runs. Instead of using it as an excuse and quitting, I researched the cause of this pain and started doing lower body soft tissue and mobility work.
Now if you’re familiar with trying to improve your mobility, especially around your hips and ankles, it’s kind of like watching paint dry. Progress is incredibly slow and seems like nothing is happing for months.
But still I kept going. I kept doing lower body mobility exercises, foam rolling and doing other myo-fascial compression techniques, trying to make even the slightest bit of improvement.
The knee and hip pain kept coming. But I was determined to become the kind of person who enjoys running. Not because running is an indicator of good overall health (it’s not), but because it was something I wanted to be better at. It was an area of fitness that I struggled with and kept me from doing things I would like to do.
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So I kept trying. I kept doing my mobility exercises. I started researching proper running mechanics, how your stride should feel, and how your foot should be striking the ground. Then I practiced what I learned. Some of it would help, some of it wouldn’t, but I kept trying and kept practicing.
This went on for months and months. Searching for that magical “runner’s high”.
Until this weekend.
The Breakthrough
Like I said at the beginning of this story, I had a breakthrough this weekend.
I was visiting my parent’s for Mother’s Day and I wanted to go for a run on Sunday morning. I had done some more reading on running mechanics that I wanted to test out. So I got up at 6:00am and was out the door by 6:45am.
Prior to this run, I was struggling to even get 5km and I would typically start getting knee and hip pain around 3km. Like I said, I suck at running.
However, I’m very happy to report that on Sunday I not only had my longest run in almost a year, coming in at 6.5km, but I also felt fantastic afterwards, with only a little bit of knee pain towards the end.
I finally found the magical “runner’s high”.
Now 6.5km is by no means a huge feat, and I still have plenty of work to do. But the point is that it was a big breakthrough for me, and it took over a year to get to this point.
Read that one more time – it took more than a year of working on things and practicing to see even this small improvement.
That’s the moral of this story. It’s not that I ran 6.5km. It’s that I didn’t stop when things got hard. I didn’t stop when I wasn’t making any progress and felt like I sucked.
The Lesson
We all have things we’re not good at, things we want to get better at. Areas of our lives that we want to see improvements in.
The problem is that most people will stop when things get hard. They won’t persevere through the difficult times. And that’s why most people never get the kind of results they want.
Maybe you’re trying to lose weight and you’re not seeing the pounds fall off as quickly as you’d like.
Or maybe you’ve been trying to simply exercise more, but you feel like you’re not very good at it and don’t really know what you’re doing. It’s uncomfortable, so you think about quitting.
These are just the hard times that you have to get through in order to get the results you want. It happens to everyone with every goal. There will always be hard times to get through.
The difference between people who succeed with their goals and those who struggle is persevering through the difficult times. People who succeed push through the times when you feel like you’re not making any progress at all. Winners assess their progress, adjust their plan, and take small steps forward every day.
That’s how you get results, make progress, become the absolute best version of yourself, and live an awesome life.
So if you’re struggling right now, keep pushing. Your own breakthrough could be just around the corner.