Personal lessons from training and running

There are about a million and ten things in life that are apt to sink your best efforts it is knowledge and wisdom to turn your back on them. With time (call it experience) it gets easier to discount the distractions and work with the attractions of a challenge and goal. I don't intend to be 'age'ist' but this for me has become easier with age. For example, I know that training plans are often designed for the ideal - that being the person who could really build their time around a training plan - and that I will have to accommodate and adapt most plans to fit my life. In the beginning this would drive me crazy with thoughts akin to "I didn't do all the sessions I'll be rubbish", now I am far more mellow about how I can swerve the distractions of not following a prescribed plan.

Browsers can on occasion get congested with open running searches

These days I work with hybrid plans, built from two or three (or more) sources that assemble into something that works for me. I don't always get it right (recent injuries testament to that) but I do keep moving in the right direction. In the beginning I wouldn't take advice all that much to heart, now with experience (age) I eat up advice hungrily and at times can't get enough! I read so many running blogs talking about marathons in the build up to my first to give myself as much of a heads up as possible. A younger me would have looked up a training plan, followed it until my legs fell off and not given a great deal of thought to learning from the tales off the efforts of others. I would, if you like, try to write 'the book' along the way rather than read it before setting out.

Image: photostock / FreeDigitalPhotos.netDoing running homework is a must for me

From what I have written above you might think "okay, reckless kid that grew up", well no I have always been fairly cautious in my approach to a lot of things. I believe that, where as I would have followed one script and bailed if it looked like the wrong one, I have simply developed ways and means of mixing / adapting scripts together to get the result. I would not have knowingly slowed to walk several times in the marathon had I not through an acquired knowledge understood the intrinsic lesson of a lot of running blogs, books, articles - "keep the final goal in mind but however you get there enjoy it!". Above all else the journey is what may well lead me to the start line of another marathon - older, more experienced, more prepared (mental and physically) for sure - more aware, more evolved, keener for the joy of a journey seen to completion for definite.