When I first started being a runner, I had never run before for fitness. I used to wake up at 5.30 am everyday and take a bus so I could run with two other new runners for 12 minutes. It was easy to make this commitment because other people I didn’t know that well were involved and I didn’t want to be a flake or let anyone down.
When I started running more seriously by myself, I learnt that actually, the most important person to trust is yourself and being able to trust yourself is the same process as being able to trust anyone else. So I had been stuck on a longest run of 5 miles and I was sick of it. I wanted to be able to go and go and go and not break my speed either, so I decided to do a runkeeper training plan. The only thing with a training plan is that you can't wing it- you can't go around being tired or blaming rain or snow or whatever, you just had to go- so that’s what I did. I just went. When it rained, when it snowed, when it was high summer, when it was a frosty day. That diligence paid off and within weeks, I was able to do half marathon distance, something I had never achieved in the years I had been running before.
I thought of trusting yourself because I was looking through my posts at times where I’d committed to a series and failed after one or two posts- at the end of the day, maybe no one cares- I’m probably the only one that cares- but me caring IS the most important thing. If you don’t feel able to trust yourself, it affects your ability to follow through, to remain consistent, to grow as a person. You have to treat your word to yourself like your word to anyone else- it has to mean something.
