10 Things I’ve Learned about Life from Professional Trail Running

1. There’s no way to know what will go wrong, but something will. So be ready to ROLL with it!

Something massive has happened, it sucks, you feel the quagmire of regret setting in. The “what ifs” the “I should haves”. This could ruin your race, which could tank your season. You’ve put in so much work, how could you have been so stupid right when it matters??

Here’s the thing, something will always happen. Sometimes it’s more problematic — like forgetting ALL your race nutrition or your race bib or getting way off course — but the one thing that’s sure is — all you can do is start from where you are now and move forward. The past is the past. Later you can reflect & take a few “for next time” learnings but not right now. Now is for taking the best steps from here forward. Occasionally there’s a one in a million that goes perfectly to plan, and when this happens it’s a bonus.

The rest of the time, be ready to take whatever happens in stride & problem solve from NOW towards the best future outcome.

2. Our minds think they are in charge but they actually have zero control, of anything

I laugh when I think about my visualization for mind & body. In my head, the Brain is this stuck-up character (a bit of a snob) who thinks they’re in charge of everything and the world bends and bows to their command, top of the world!

The Body is an easy-going good natured laid-back individual who most of the time shrugs & says “sure” to the Brain’s commands. Sometimes Body shakes their head with mild disappointment and continues on with whatever they were told to do.
Most of the time this is the dynamic, Brain giving commands and Body being chill & thinking to itself, “sure you can pretend you’re in charge”.

Then sometimes, on occasion, Body pulls a veto. Like an injury or a medical situation. In essence responding to a command from Brain with “nope, not going to happen”. The Brain can yell & scream and kick & bite but the Body’s not going anywhere.

This shows who’s really in charge. So Brain, be nice to Body. Without Body’s buy-in you’re not going ANYWHERE. And you don’t want it pulling any veto cards. 😉

3. Finger crossing is a very tempting and an equally risky strategy

What I mean by finger crossing is the concept of doing some stuff & hoping that the rest will work out. I’d say this is fine in some things, it saves a lot of time and frequently works out ok. BUT, it’s a lot different for the things you really care about.

I’ve fallen into this trap before coming off a winter of road running. It’s something like “ah, my stabilizers (stabilizing muscles, read anti-ankle-roll-muscles) were really strong last year they’ll probably be fine going into this year. I’ll just be careful for the first couple of weeks.” If running was something I cared less about, it would be a bummer if I got injured but it would be ok, sure, finger crossing would be fine.

But, running is more important to me. It’s my passion. I’m popping for the season. To push myself internationally, to run some super competitive races & get fully in the mix.
So for the stuff you truly care about: there’s “doing everything you that you can” puts you in a better position for success when the guaranteed unknowns arise and in a better place with mental confidence. When the unknowns come up “you’ve done everything you could to prepare, now it’s time to go from here.

4. The body (and mind) only have a certain capacity for training & recovery: the importance of choosing what to do

I used to do everything. The more time in the gym, in a fitness class, a yoga class, the more time doing everything and anything athletic the better. Oddly enough, this was before I was a pro athlete. I was just executing my drive to be “better”, and I had the conception that the more time spent exercising, the “better” I would be.

I now know this thinking was totally flawed, for many reasons, but here are two.
1) continual effort feels worthwhile but means that I’m only every pushing at a medium level all the time. (Because I’m too tired to do anything else and easy feels pointless.) Physiologically, medium effort doesn’t do much in terms of adaptation & development.
2) The body actually only has a certain capacity for training at a time. Putting more activities into that period of training doesn’t make you stronger, instead it likely sacrifices recovery and may make you weaker. Workouts are literally breaking down your muscles, temporarily decreasing their strength. Recovery is the time where muscles build themselves back to be stronger.

So, for sustainable training, it is essential to choose how to use one’s training capacity in ways that enable the movement towards your goals.

For example in running, if I want to get stronger at running hills, I’ll focus on growing my uphill power and only maintain my speedy running. My body doesn’t have the physical capacity to build both uphill power and speed at the same time.

I think this translates directly into life, with another fixed variable, time. We have a certain capacity of time (generally about 24hours/day) and we choose what we do with that time. We can’t make more hours and choosing one thing means that other things are maintained or fall away. That’s reality, and contrary to assumptions, this fixed amount of time is not a bad thing. (Read the book 4,000 Weeks or my Life is Finite blog post).

What’s most important to me is that I’m aware of my capacity, and that I am consciously choosing what I put my time and effort into. I’m deciding where I put those 4,000 weeks of life.

5. When bad things happen it is good practice/You can choose how things affect you

There are lots of things that can be frustrating during a workout (or during life).

• Ice/snow on a day you have a speed workout
• Long uphills when you just want to get home
• Judging the weather wrong & running much too warm
• “My tummy hurts so much, I shouldn’t have eaten so much so soon before running”
• Headwinds (enough said)

Frustration is definitely a legitimate feeling (all feelings are legitimate), but it’s also not particularly helpful, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t love feeling frustrated.

So here’s the key, shifting your mindset. All of these examples above can be turned from frustrating situations into good workouts.

• Ice/snow on a day you have a speed workout -> Ice, good practice for running economy, keeping your feet under you, fast cadence and planning ahead for turns. Snow, effort based workout, more strength & stabilizer muscles.
• Long uphills when you just want to get home -> Bonus practice for the end of long races, staying mentally strong & consistent when really tired.
• Judging the weather wrong & running much too warm -> Good heat training. Maybe keep the jacket on for bonus. And the next run in shorts will feel soo good.
• “My tummy hurts so much, I shouldn’t have eaten so much so soon before running” -> this is good practice for training my stomach for handling food while running.
• Headwinds (enough said) -> Great training for handling an uncontrollable difficulty, lean into it and smile. Also when you think about it, running upwind is much cooler!

As a human, you can choose how things affect you, so take the situation and choose to find the positive.

7. It can’t always get worse. Unless the situation is literally life threatening (where death is an option), at some point it must get better

In low points, there are two options,
1) sit in the mire of how terrible it is (which sounds sucky) OR
2) focus forward, it WILL get better (for certain). Do anything that might help things turn around sooner (if any), shift your mindset to the positive (if possible), and be patient. It will turn around.

8. Weather is weather, it’s happening around you but not inside you

Weather for me has an inordinate effect on how I’m feeling. Sunny = joy, rainy = meh. However, I’m learning to see the beauty and the fun in all weather. The way raindrops plop into puddles and make a little sploosh & a splash. The way snow crunches (or splooshes) underfoot and clings to branches and street signs in funny ways.

It seems silly to let things like how much cloud in the sky or snow on the ground dictate my feelings for the day or my run; as I said above, you can choose how things affect you.

9. Time doesn’t have a meaning. What is in the time is what matters

In trail racing your time, unlike in a road race, means very little. Trail racing courses are vastly different from each other. Some are more technical (rocky or otherwise un-smooth surfaces), others have more hills or mountains; so comparing times between different races is almost meaningless. Even within the same race there are a myriad of variables, heat, weather, trail conditions, which make direct comparisons of times between different years pretty un-useful.

In life, I think that this is the same. You can say to yourself that you worked for five hours. Super, good job, but, could you have done the same work in three hours? Was the work busywork? Or did you take a chunk of time to really actually learn something, for real, and do the project the right way?

Unfortunately there isn’t much in society’s current work setups which reward for work done efficiently or rigorously. Hourly work often pays less for jobs done efficiently, and jobs done rigorously are sometimes downgraded as slow work.

So perhaps more in your personal life, what have you chosen to put into your time which is valuable to you?

10. The power of choosing what one wants, deciding on the steps and making them happen

I wouldn’t be where I am today, if a friend hadn’t said to me, “it sounds like you want to go race these big races, why aren’t you?”

I realized:
– If I wanted to be a competitive runner, I should go for it.
– If I didn’t go for it, that meant I didn’t really want it enough to put in the effort to pull together the courage, to make the steps, and take the leap towards what I wanted.
– If it was true that I didn’t care enough, I should stop pretending I wanted it (since I didn’t care enough to try to make it happen).
– And, on the flip size, if I cared about it, get cracking! Start chipping off steps towards the future I wanted.

So I started chipping.