Staying Motivated & Beyond: Mental Aspects

Staying Motivated and Beyond: Mental Aspects of Running

    THE LONGER YOU ENGAGE IN A RUNNING PROGRAM, the easier it becomes to stick with it. In fact, after a few years of the sport, many runners report feeling "not quite right" after a stretch of inactivity-a feeling that's as much mental as physical. When you reach that stage, motivation is hardly a problem. A run is often the highlight of your day.

    But until that point arrives, most runners will wake up to days when staying in bed seems more inviting than the dark, heat, cold, wind, or whatever else awaits them outdoors. On these days, figuring out how to stay motivated is crucial.
    Motivation can droop for any number of reasons: Boredom, lack of results, stress, and a shortage of time are primary among them. Some people are natural experts at finding motivation even in the face of such adversity. But if you're more inclined to fold than to fight, you can still develop motivation, just as you'd develop your muscles.
    When you find yourself dreading a run instead of looking forward to it, you should first determine whether your feelings are truly due to laziness or boredom or whether they are instead a sign of exhaustion or an oncoming bout of illness. If the latter, you'd be smart to listen to your body and modify or skip the workout.

    But if you're otherwise healthy, beware the classic signs of lack of motivation: finding excuses not to run, stalling with other projects, or experiencing feelings of boredom or listlessness. When you find yourself in that lazy frame of mind, try some of the tips outlined in the rest of this chapter. And even if you succumb to the couch one day, don't put yourself down. Instead, just make sure not to let one poor day stretch into a pattern of inactivity. Every day is a fresh start; don't measure yourself by yesterday's troubles. Finally, remember that just about whatever you're suffering from, you'll feel much better after you go for a run.
    When boredom strikes, fight back. If you're fighting boredom, it's probably a sign that you could use some variety and new challenges in your running. Do you always run in the same place? At the same speed? For the same distance? No wonder your motivation is flagging.
    Many runners become creatures of habit; they do the same three or four loops over and over again. When you find that you've dug yourself a rut, shake yourself out of it. There are no rules in running, so go have some fun: Leave your watch at home and run just by feel. Drive to a new trail for a change of scenery. Plan a run with friends to a cafe in the next town (drop a car there before you start). When you have time, set out on an adventure, taking every turn your heart desires. Chances are you'll discover a renewed sense of wonder along with a new running route.
    Take the first few steps. You can often overcome lack of motivation by focusing only on getting started rather than working up the gumption to take on an entire workout. It's been said that the first step out the door is the hardest, and any runner will attest to that truth. When laziness strikes, make a deal with yourself that you'll at least give the run a try. Change clothes, head out the door, and start moving. In most cases, the fresh air and circulation will have an energizing effect, stimulating you enough to get through the run. If, after 10 minutes or so, you're still truly trudging, try
walking or just call it a day. Maybe you're overtired and your body is trying to tell you that you need rest more than exercise.
    It might help to remember that even the best runners in the world have days when their minds and bodies would rather head out for ice cream than for a workout. Jackie Joyner-Kersee, one of the greatest female athletes of all time, admits that she played the just-get-out-the-door game, too, when she was competing. "I' d tell myself just to start," she once said. "Then, even if I couldn't get through it all, at least I'd done something."
    Make running a priority. People don't marvel when you show up for work every day; it's expected. Try giving your run the same type of priority in your schedule. If this seems daunting, try it out for just 2 weeks-enough time to set a new pattern. Think of it as an investment in yourself.
    Be social. Set a date to run with a partner. It's harder to skip a run when you know that a friend is relying on you.
   Do dwell on the past. Think back to previous runs and how good you felt during and afterward. Chances are that if you're feeling unmotivated, your energy could use a jump-start, and running will be just the thing.
    Prepare the outfit for your run. Place your running shoes and clothes by your bedside if you run in the morning. If you run right after work, set them out next to your desk. Having your running attire in plain view will help motivate you to run.
   Set a goal. Without a goal to strive for, working out can seem aimless and pointless. Some runners find it hard to train at all if they don't have a race, social event, or other goal to shoot for. Anyone can have a goal; it needn't be a fast time in a race. Beginners can aim for running 30 minutes without stopping or just for exercising 5 days a week for a month.

    MAINTAIN A POSITIVE ATTITUDE
    A big part of motivation is not letting the doldrums creep into our mindset. All runners have days when their legs feel as if they just won't move. They feel sluggish and "flat," and no matter how hard they try, they can't find a comfortable groove. Some women react with tension when their bodies don't do what's expected. As expectations become loaded and muscles grow tight, running becomes even harder. Motivation can suffer as a result. The cycle, which can go on for days or weeks, can lead to frustration, anger, and even depression. Professional runners know that there will always be those days. No matter what your running level, you'd do well to keep their wisdom in mind.
    Willie Rios, who specializes in coaching women distance runners, drills the importance of staying positive into each of his runners' heads. Rios likes to recount one story of a runner who was having a frustrating workout. "She was getting angry because her times were so much slower than they had been," he says. "By changing the focus of the workout---in this case, to thinking about the triumph of just completing it on a day where it would have been easy to walk away---she had an opportunity to learn something about herself and to experience a success rather than a defeat."
    Within every run, there are successes and defeats. As an advanced runner, you learn that you can make a conscious decision to focus on either the negative or the positive. Sure, you can always find defeats: not going as fast as you had hoped, not feeling light on your feet, not having time to run as far as you expected. But you can always find successes just as easily. Some days, it's going farther or pushing harder than ever before. Some days, the success is just getting out the door. Some days-on the really rough days a success can be as simple as staying in good spirits and reminding yourself that tomorrow is a fresh opportunity to feel better. It's a lesson that, once learned on the run, proves invaluable when applied to other aspects of life.     Rios has been known to admonish women who downplay their accomplishments or find fault after every workout. "When you beat yourself up like that, you invite every abusive person from your past back into your life. You reinforce any negative message ever heard from a boss, boyfriend, or husband," he says. "You don't want other people to treat you like that. Why would you do it to yourself?"
    A positive attitude can be cultivated. Try some of these ideas:
    After every run, find at least one success. Perhaps you allowed yourself to relax and enjoy the clouds. Or maybe you felt tired but didn't let that stop you. The more ways you can find success, the happier you will be with your running.
    Write or recite positive affirmations. Negativity often stems from a difference between your perception of where you are and your perception of where you want to be. Instead of dwelling on negative self-talk, replace it with positive affirmation. For example, when you find yourself thinking, I can't believe I ran that slowly, try telling yourself instead, I am lucky to be blessed with strong, healthy legs.
   Build a positive support team. It's important to surround yourself with people who want you to succeed. (That goes for running, but it's sage advice for every aspect of your life.) Professional runners are experts at creating support systems that encourage their best performance. Detach yourself from running partners, "friends," and coaches who downplay your achievements, question your goals, deride your weight, or make you feel generally miserable about yourself. Find others who boost your confidence and encourage your efforts.
    Keep running in perspective. Just as women go through different phases in work and home life, they can expect to go through different phases in their running. Recognizing this can go a long way toward alleviating frustration and allowing only positive forces to flow from the sport.
    If you've become used to the daily affirmation of an energizing run, an interruption in the routine can prove devastating. A new job, a return to school, a baby---any number of changes can shift priorities and make running seem more of a chore than a rejuvenation. An ensuing cycle of failed expectations can foster self-doubt and negativity.

    Susan Kalish, former executive director of the American Running Association, went through such a period after the birth of her first child. "I felt gross and fat and embarrassed," she remembers. "I didn't return to fitness anywhere near as fast as I thought I would, and I felt like my running, which had been my good friend, was humiliating me."
    After the birth of her second child, Kalish decided to take a different approach, removing any expectation of a timeline in which to return to her former level of running. The approach worked, and she once again reaped the positive benefits she had remembered. "I had thought running was letting me down, but it was just changing," she says.
    It is particularly important for women, who are busy with so many responsibilities to others, to keep running in perspective. Remember that running should not become just another source of pressure or expectation. Think of your run as your own personal time to meditate, relax, enjoy, and think. You'll be guaranteed to find motivation for this time of the day.

    THE MANY BENEFITS OF MENTAL FITNESS
    Staying motivated is an aspect of running that you must work at and develop. But there's a flip side to exercising your mental muscle: The mental strength that the sport demands and encourages leads to benefits that extend far beyond the physical. In a way, running gives back as much as---or even more than---it takes. As you work to develop your motivation and as you
progress with your running, don't be surprised if you find a positive impact on other areas of your life.
    Take this example: Sitting down to breakfast the day before a race, a number of female runners were discussing why they ran. Time to myself, some said. Empowerment. Sanity. When it was one woman's turn to speak, she listed a few reasons. Stress relief Fitness, of course. And then came this: Recently, one woman's husband had attacked her for the first time. Running was something
she could do for herself in order to feel strong and in control.
    The women at the table nodded their heads in understanding. Not one of them seemed particularly shocked by this stranger's soul-baring statement. In some way, they'd been there themselves. They hadn't necessarily been victims of physical abuse. But they had needed a sense of strength and control in their lives. Maybe the feeling came when they started a new job. Or
when one of their children was troubled. Or when they were suffering from pointed loneliness. Somehow, running had given them strength.
    It's something that women runners themselves marvel at. Get them in a group and invariably the subject will meander over to something far deeper than split times and waist sizes. For most women runners, the sport is more than a great aerobic workout; in some way, it fills a corner of their souls. Women speak of running as meditation, therapy, quiet time, an outlet for emotion, a
catalyst for growth, a microcosm of their bigger picture. Running takes on these roles and more, often with powerful effects on your whole life.
    Anne Audain, one of the sport's first female professionals and cofounder of the St. Luke's Women's Fitness Celebration, in Boise, Idaho, says that she boils the essence and benefits of running down to one word: movement. It's a word that comes up time and again when speaking to women about the impact of their running.
    "By movement, I mean cleansing," Audain says. "By moving the body itself, you are moving not just air, food, and blood but even thought through the body. If you let things sit still, you'll get cobwebs. Movement gives you so much more energy."
    And that means energy for all aspects of your life: physical, mental, and emotional. Runners quickly realize that the three are connected. Many women who enter the sport for the health or weight management benefits find themselves continuing for the mental and emotional energy. In a survey of women runners of all ages and abilities, more than half said that stress relief and time by themselves were the main reasons they ran.
    Marathoner Jerry Lynch, Ph.D., one of the country's premier sports psychologists and founder of the TaoSports Center for Human Potential in Santa Cruz, California, puts it this way: ''A woman who embraces a running program and the movement that comes with it now has a metaphor for movement in the rest of her life." Dr. Lynch believes that many women who find themselves at a crossroads in life are ripe to discover the integration of body, mind, and spirit that running offers. Although these women focus on their bodies as the starting point for change when they begin running, the benefits can't help but move into other parts of their lives as well. Mary, 52, is a great example. After only 3 months in the sport, she decided to run a marathon. "I'm at a crossroads in my life," she explained. "I needed a change; I'm going back to school, and it's all connected for me. If I can take this step with the running, then I can take the others as well," Now that's motivation. 

    How is it that an act as simple as putting one foot in front of the other can reap such complex rewards? The key might be running's simplicity. The sport lends itself to a meditative quality that's not possible in many other activities. Self-propelled and in touch with the ground, not reliant on or distracted by equipment, the runner finds that her mind is free to wander or focus as she chooses.
    "It is something that is unique to running. You see it somewhat in other individual sports, but particularly in running because it is so measurable," says Diane Palmason, who holds age-group records in distances ranging from 200 meters to 50 miles for women over the age of 60. "When you accomplish something in running, it is so obvious that it is you and you alone who accomplished it. In other areas of our life, there is rarely an obvious measure. In running, when you achieve a quantifiable goal, you have every right to feel good about yourself."

    When women do achieve goals in running---whether losing 20 pounds or breaking 20 minutes for a 5-K---they grow far beyond those results, and sometimes beyond what men would experience in similar situations.
    Although men have grown up developing positive self-images through sports, most middle-age and older women have yet to experience similar affirmation. Women who come to sports later in life find their own playing ground on which to develop confidence and control. With girls today taking part in sports as a matter of fact, future generations of women probably won't have to wait until middle age to make such gains.
    Running can have such a positive effect in a woman's life that clinical psychologist Leon J. Hoffman, Ph.D., includes the sport as treatment in his Chicago practice. "Unfortunately, in today's world, affirmation is crucial," says Dr. Hoffman, a member of the American Running Association. "Some women have problems because they have been trained to be funnels, not cups. For these women, when the applause stops, the depression sets in. But running can fill that. A woman can do it at her own pace, be assertive, try different things, be expressive, enjoy her body. She can give all these good things to herself, and not have to rely on somebody else or have it be in response to a man."
    Sports psychologist Lynch says that running and women are a natural match. The sport requires one to be fluid, or "soft but strong," which he considers intrinsically feminine characteristics. "Women tend to find the more spiritual, deeper side of running. It is just natural for women to align themselves with the concepts of courage, companionship, and cooperation. Win or lose, when women run a race, at the end they hug, congratulate each other, and then talk about how to improve the next time, all the while learning and achieving their goals."

The Road to Self-Discovery
    Many women find that running changes their lives for the better in some way, large or small. These women felt so strongly about the benefits that they made running their life's work.
    ►   For me, running resulted in a total coming out from a caterpillar into a butterfly. Maybe nobody else could see it, but I could. It started when my 12-year-old daughter beat the whole school in the 600-yard dash---the boys, too. We saw that she had some talent and, to encourage her running, I took her to the track. I sat on the sidelines and watched her all summer. Finally my girlfriend and I started slogging around the track ourselves. At the age of 32, I realized that I could run, and even run fast. That confidence totally changed my outlook on life. It was the start of a
great blossoming.
    -HENLEY GABEAU, former executive director, Road Runners Club of America
    ►   When I started running, I was married and a mother of four. And that's how I saw myself: as a mother and a wife-certainly all those things before an individual. But when I started running, I was surprised to see that the people I ran with didn't care about those other things. They related to me as Diane. It gave me a strong feeling of who I was, separate from all the roles I had. Ultimately, it gave me courage to make changes in the rest of my life, including seeking more supportive relationships.
    -DIANE PALMASON, champion 60+ age-group competitor and cofounder of Women's Running Camps
    ►   I was born with bone deformities and had both feet re-formed when I was 13. I first joined a running club when I was going through rehab as a kid. Women weren't allowed to run very far back then, only 400 and 800 meters, but I loved it immediately. For me, even though I did it competitively, I used running as a meditation for all those years. To this day, if I have a business
decision to make, or if I have some stress, or if something is just really annoying me, I'll go out and run. If the run makes it go away, I think, Okay, it's not that important. If it's still there bothering me, then I know I need to deal with it. It's my form of stress release and meditation.
    -ANNE AUDAIN, Cofounder of the St. Luke's Women's Fitness Celebration and one of the first professional female runners

HOW RUNNING HELPS WOMEN
    Almost any physical activity will improve your mental state. A body of research has shown that exercise, particularly endurance-oriented activity, can elevate moods and alleviate stress in both men and women. But speak to women runners, and you'll find more going on than a simple endorphin buzz. The benefits seem to go beyond science and benefits at the cellular level.
    See if any of these comments from women runners ring a bell with you:
    ►   "Running has a very calming effect on me; it's a time when I meditate and work out unsolved problems and generate my most creative thinking."
    ►   "I feel so great about myself and my life after a run."
    ►   "It's very empowering to feel strong and to have the mental endurance to be by myself for hours at a time."
    ►   "Running makes me happy and optimistic; it helps me solve problems and get a better perspective."
    ►   "Running gives me confidence and inner peace. I am stronger and more in tune with where I'm going in life."
    ►   "It gives me a boost in my self-esteem---it makes me think I can do other things."
    ►   "I now have a confidence and a sense of competence that has filled all of my life."

TRAINING LOG
    I ran in the rain today, a loamy smell escaping the warm spring earth. I ran at first a grown woman, slowly, slowly growing new once more.
    I ran through mud puddles on the trail, the cold, thin brew of coffee-and-milk-colored water shocking my toes awake. I ran until I slipped the world of time and taxes, work and weariness that I had left at my desk just minutes before.
    I ran until there wasn't an inch of dryness to be found. Drenched and dripping, giving in, a smile spread across my face. I ran until I was a child.
    And the others still out in the rain---the ones who hadn't scurried back inside, who had also given in---they replied with smiles of their own. We were all children out there, running in the rain, no matter our age.
    As the thunderclouds slipped down the mountainside and closed in around the trail, I turned toward home. Floating along in my child's stride. Un-tired. Un-bound. The closest thing to child's play.
    I imagined myself an old woman, twenty years or so down the road. Still running. Lacing up my shoes and leaving worries and old bones at the door. Floating along in my child's stride. Slower, to be sure, but still running. Growing young again each day, if only for an hour.
    Every run is a work of art, a drawing on each day's canvas. Some runs are shouts and some runs are whispers. Some runs are eulogies and others celebrations. When you're angry, a run can be a sharp slap in the face. When happy, a run is your song. And when your running progresses enough to become the chrysalis through which life is viewed, motivation is almost beside the point. Rather, it's running that motivates you for everything else the day holds.

FROM: Complete Book of Women's Running By Dagny Scott Barrios -- Chapter 12