When coaching doesn’t work

The first marathon (42.195km) I ever entered I came home in 4 hours and 43 minutes & 55 seconds.?

Just completing a marathon takes a LOT of training.

I trained for 12 weeks, and I was averaging 50-60km of running a week. Some of my long runs leading up to the marathon were 35-38 Km which would see me out on the road at 3am on Saturday mornings to catch the cooler temperatures.?

If you’re thinking, what crazy woman would get up at 3am to run 38km just for the training part of the marathon,??stay with me, I promise it will be helpful for you to achieve your goals.?

I was happy to have finished and to get the time I did but for ALL that training, effort, and dedication, I hoped I would have done better. In fact, it’s a goal of many marathon runners to do a marathon in sub four hours. So yes, I was happy to finish but REALLY wanted to do a sub four-hour marathon; so, three years later I decided to get a coach to see if I could achieve my goal.

My coach wrote me a training program, told me what to eat, and motivated me throughout the 12 weeks of working with him. He would encourage me by constantly telling me how much I was improving.?

I needed to hear every one of his encouraging words as I couldn’t see the subtle changes as I got stronger, faster, and leaner that he could see. And I admit I needed the emotional boost of someone who had done what I wanted to achieve telling me how great I was doing regularly. It seemed to make me try harder and push harder for him and me.??I felt like he had my back and I trusted him because he had done many sub four-hour marathons.?

The last week before the event he said to me that I was on track to run a?3-hour 45-minute marathon.??I was absolutely over the moon with excitement. All the hard work and dedication had paid off and I was set to realise a lifelong dream.

This thinking is not different with anything you?really want?in your life, like losing those extra 10kg that’s creeped on over the last few years, to writing a book, to building a business that runs without you.??Move towards something that you’d like to achieve, you don’t even have to know exactly what that would look like, just make a start and begin to put all the recourses around you to help you achieve it. Do whatever you need to make it ‘the road of least resistance’?

BUT there’s a trick, you must get to a stage that you want it bad enough to fight the fear, push through the exhaustion, resist the temptation of falling back into what you know, the familiarity and comfort of your old ways when it all gets too hard.?

If you don’t make it significant enough or put a large amount of importance on your goal, there isn’t any book, program, workshop, or coach that will help you achieve your goals. You have to be the one with the internal drive to want it.?

Making a start is the first courageous step. Figure out if you’re a carrot or a stick person, then surround yourself with everything you need that will feed into your dream.??

Steve Jobs did an interview in 1995 that I absolutely love, and I’ve included an excerpt from it below.?

“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

“The minute you understand that you can poke life, and that if you push something in, something will pop out the other side. That you can change it and you can mould it…that’s maybe the most important thing… Embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. Once you learn that, you’ll want to change life and make it better. You’ll never be the same again.”

There’s something truly appealing about ‘Poking Life’ and seeing what you’re capable of, in business, health, fitness and relationships.??Don’t be afraid of failure, be afraid of not having a go.

NB: If you’re interested in how I went in the marathon; as I said I was fit and ready to do a 3.45 marathon, we booked accommodation on the Gold Coast, all my family came down to watch me.??Sadly, my son had got the flu a week before and I was avoiding him as much as I could and three days before he drank out of my water bottle and I didn’t know…I wasn’t feeling great when I lined up to the start line, and probably shouldn’t have run. I got to 34km and had to pull out.??Instantly (after having a little cry) set another goal of doing a marathon when I’m 80; so that will keep me accountable to staying??‘running’ fit for the next few decades.?