“The only time you should ever look back is to see how far you’ve come.”

If you’ve been through a wild roller coaster year, the last thing you might want to do is to reflect upon the past.  However, I do feel that there is a time and place to reflect.  Your past can reshape your future for the better, to change directions, to change mindsets, and to unlock the future possibilities.  This past year’s wild ride is coming to a resting place in the vault, but I’ll take the lessons I’ve learned to kick start a better tomorrow.  The better tomorrow starts now.  Why wait?  The future is bright.

1. “Everything will be okay.” – Raul Verdusco
   When life is out of control, it takes a patient person to remind me that everything will always work out, even when the storms keep happening and it’s hard to stay afloat.  This patient person has been my husband.  During the darkest days of the year, sometimes this is the only phrase that kept me going to the next day.  I doubted this phrase very often, but in reflecting, it always held true.  He was right and I just needed to trust this phrase more than I wanted to.
   
   
2. “You don’t know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have.” – Anonymous  This phrase helped me hurdle through grief, injury, discovery, surgery, recovery, and fighting the pandemic as a healthcare team member.  When you are faced with hardship, you can give up so much more easily than fighting.  But if you dig inside yourself deeper than you ever have, you will always have a burning fire to keeping fighting.  It’s a reminder than the dim light still shines even in the darkest of days.
   
   
3. “Respect your ecosystems.” – Nathan Carlson and Chris Johnson
   In short, this is a reminder to stop saying yes to everything and start making yourself a priority.  Handling careers, families, relationships, day-to-day responsibilities, hobbies, and passion, while getting through a pandemic is not an easy feat.  As much as we try to keep the ecosystems in harmony with each other, sometimes an individual ecosystem is unruly and wild, draining time and energy from another ecosystem.  In order to be the best caretaker of your ecosystems, you have to take care of yourself.  If your body or soul is talking, it’s time to listen.  You are not able to help others unless you help yourself first.
   
   
4. “Less is more.”  – Garrett McLaughlin
   This is a hard concept to embrace, but one that my functional fitness coach has engrained in my mind.  There comes a point where if you push past the point of more, you will be forced to do less.  Instead of getting to that point, just step back and start doing less now.  It will get you farther in life, in sport, in your ability to accomplish your goals, and in keeping yourself happy.  Another way to think about this is to “do less things better.”  Get back to the fundamentals and work at doing them well.  If you focus on a few things instead of many things, you will find that you are more successful at doing those few things better.  Stop trying to cram everything into one day.  Stop running excessive miles without attention to recovery.  Stop scrolling unnecessarily on social media.  Stop working at your next promotion around the clock.  Start doing less to do it better.  Change begins with you.
   
   
5. “Stress + Rest = Growth.”  – Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness
   Periodizing your life is essential to keep growing.  This applies to your fitness, to your career, and to your personal life.  As much as we want to be the energizer rabbit and go through life at full rocket speed, there comes a point for periodizing and prioritizing rest and rejuvenation.  Applying this to my running life has been a key staple that I overlooked.  We are so obsessive about losing fitness during periods of rest that we don’t take rest seriously.  Failure to doing so results in repercussions such as forced rest from injury, burnout, and stagnant progress.  In the broader scheme of life, periods of stress cause extra energy utilization that must be replenished.  Sometimes, rest and recovery takes longer than we want to devote to it.  However, keeping in mind periodization is truly how you can grow to reach past your goals.  It’s time we respect the resting process, which is my main prioritization of 2022.
   
   
6. “Progress spurs process.” – Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness
   It’s very easy to get overwhelmed with lack of progress or a destination in the horizon that seems so far away.  It’s easy to give up along the journey when nothing seems to be going in the direction you’d like or expected.  However, if we focus on the task at hand, one day at a time, the glimmer of progress will keep you moving through the process.  Sometimes a process takes detours and encounters roadblocks, but trusting in the process will get you to the goal.  Listen to your doubts but show them the door as your progress ignites your process.  Celebrate small wins along the way, for they hold the fuel to the future.
   
   
7. “Your passion should never be your entire story.  Branch out from it.”  – Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness
   More simply described, when you pour your heart and soul into one thing, that only thing becomes your clutch.  Other things suffer.  What happens on the day when your only thing is taken away?  What happens to your identity?  Be in harmony with your one thing but don’t let other things suffer.  Be well-rounded and let your passions illuminate other aspects of life that you might enjoy.  This will be a major player in my personal life going into 2022.  I’ve got some exciting things in the works for 2022.  After having my identity taken away with a year-ending injury in July, I’ve learned the importance of keeping a harmonious passion and exploring more that fitness has to offer.  Bring on the pullups, pushups, plyometrics, and fitness adventures of 2022.  You haven’t seen the best of me yet.
   
   
8. “Learn what you can do and get to work.” – Jay Dicharry
   There is always something you can do if you change your mindset.  When you can’t do what you’ve always enjoyed, you must pivot and adapt into what you can do.  Change your mindset to change your life.  For me, there was a period of six weeks where I couldn’t do anything besides walk and rest.  I took advantage of this time to realize how incredibly peaceful quiet time is, to explore nature in ways I have never seen before, and to read books that have been mind-stimulating while splaying my toes to work on my foundational basics.  There’s always something you can do to get better, smarter, and wiser than before.  Stop making excuses, asking for sympathy, and just buckle down to get to work on building your future.
   
   
9. “80% of runners will run at 80% intensity 80% of the time which is why 80% get injured.” – Chris Johnson
   Being someone who has relatively been injury free most of my fitness life, I never fully understood what it meant to have your dreams and plans shattered in the blink of an eye.  But what has been eye-opening is the support structure of who will be there to help put the pieces back together and who disappears into the unknown.  One of the pieces of my recovery journey has been 18 hours of webinars, learning about running-related injuries and how to fix them properly.  Knowledge is powerful.  The power of learning can have huge profound effects on the rehab journey.  Injury rates among runners are extraordinarily high due to intensity.  Learning how to do less things wiser with reduced intensity while the best Sherpa leads the way is the key to a patient comeback journey on the way to success.
   
   
10. Believe in yourself always.
    To be successful in reaching any goal, you must believe in yourself and your ability to reach that goal.  You have to visualize the goal.  Fear ravagers called self-doubt, insecurities, and hesitations can attempt to steal your belief in yourself.  Tears can attempt to ruin any fleeting moment of happiness.  But, to pick yourself up from rock bottom, to finish goals you’ve started once before, and to begin a new journey starts with believing in yourself once again.  This is how I crushed my marathon record in March and gave an extra punch to the time clock in June.  This is how I accomplished becoming an all-around plank champ and achieved one full pull-up by the end of year after summer’s abdominal surgery.  And this is how I will get after my goals of 2022: believing in myself always, through the ups and downs of life.
    

Finally, as I conclude this last post for 2021, I leave you with the following:

“Our struggles can catalyze our future
into something different.”

Nathan Carlson

I’m ready for something different, the next story, the next journey, the next powerful moment. The future starts today.  Let’s go!