Stop Setting This Dangerous Precedent In Your Life:
Live in reality and start setting realistic goals.
About 10 years ago is when I began to have aspirations to run ultra marathons. I would look at races on ultrasignup.com all the time. I would find a race that I wanted to sign up for but would never pull the trigger. I began a routine of looking at price increase dates, putting it in my calendar and decide that I would pull the trigger then.
Every time that date came around, I was in the same spot that I was in the date I put the reminder in my calendar. This process of kicking the can down the road would continue for years.
Embrace Reality
“Toughness is about embracing the reality of where we are and what we have to do. Not deluding ourselves, filling ourselves with false confidence, or living in denial. All of that simply sends us sprinting off the line, only to slow to a walk once reality hits. Being tough begins long before we enter the arena or walk on stage. It starts with our expectations.” — Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness
I wasn’t embracing the reality I was in. The truth was, I enjoyed the dream of running an ultra marathon as much as running the race itself.
This is a dangerous precedent to set.
When you love having a dream more than the reality of chasing the dream, you begin a path of living a fraudulent life.
“If I had ‘x’ amount of extra hours a day, I could learn this.”
“If I didn’t have a full time job, I would workout for 4 hours a day.”
Excuses are false confidence. Every excuse that we make is a deflection of the reality we are in. We make them so we don’t feel bad about our shortcomings or face a reality about ourselves.
It’s okay to be afraid of chasing your goals. It’s okay to admit that you don’t have what it takes right now. What you have to acknowledge is the reality it will take to get there. The path is seldom linear.
Breaking Promises To Yourself
After beginning to set a precedent o breaking promises to myself, I noticed other promises to myself were starting to be broken.
“I’m going to wake up at 5:00am to workout.”
Followed by sleeping in for a week straight after telling myself every night I would wake up.
All this did was make me feel like shit. I felt like a loser who couldn’t follow through. I devalued myself.
When you devalue yourself, you lose sight of the person you are. You feel like you’re not good at anything so you stop trying at everything.
Maybe the goal isn’t important enough to you. If it is important enough to you, maybe you’re holding onto it too hard.
One thing that I have found is that when something is important to me, I tend to try to do too much and end up burning out. One problem is with personal goals is that the real life ramifications are usually not that extreme on a day to day basis. It’s not the same as if you missed paying a bill or sleeping in for work.
The ramifications are small, they eat away at your soul little by little. The way to move forward is also the same way.
How I Broke Out Of My Old Patterns:
In 2018, I decided to muster up the courage and sign up for an ultra marathon. It was the McNaughton 50 miler near Peoria, Illinois. I had run marathons in my past but running 50 miles on trail was going to be nothing like what this was going to be. The promise I made to myself was whether or not I was ready, I was going to show up and give it a try.
It was a week before the race and I wasn’t ready. In fact, I don’t think I ran more than 10 miles in one go all year.
All the excuses started to roll in. None of them were legitimate.
So I went to REI, got a race vest, a bunch of bars, meal replacement powder and made my own electrolyte concoction that I would keep in a flask.
The first lap of the 10 mile loop was brutal. It rained the night before and I brought road shoes. I was slipping and sliding. Thank god I brought some shoes I wore for past Spartan Races. After the first lap, I changed shoes and gave it another go.
The second lap was a lot better than the first, so I kept going. Mile 30 was when I started to hit a wall. “How was I going to make it another 20 miles?” I thought.
If I was going to quit, I had to at least be at another aid station to tell someone so I made it my goal to make it to the next aid station. Then when I made it to the next aid station, I felt okay and didn’t want to quit so I made it the goal to get to the next aid station.
THAT WAS IT! Mentally, I couldn’t think about the miles I had left to go or about how many miles I had already run. I had to think about making it to the next checkpoint.
Much of life is that way. To accomplish a big goal you need to break it down into something achievable, so achievable that there’s no reason not to do it.
Crossing that finish line was one of the most proud moments of my life. I couldn’t believe that I had done it.
There is no linear path to regaining respect for yourself. It starts with being realistic and setting achievable goals for you at that time. It’s often hard for us to see where we will be in even a years time. Instead of trying to accomplish the entire goal at once and setting yourself up for failure, set a small goal. Make it to the next aid station.