Excuses are just that...excuses

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit" -Aristotle

Highlights of my training week/week:

1. A workout consisting of only skips, no running, just skips. A cumulative 1050 meters of high skips and fast skips. Skipping will never be the same. My calves will never be the same.
2.  3 1/2 days of semi-forced rest, not because my body necessarily needed it but due to travel and emotional distress (The passing of a dear friend). 
3. Learning curves & mental notes to self:  

• Refer to entry quote. 
• Stop making excuses like #2 no matter how legit it may seem to be.
• I only hurt myself in the long run with missed workouts. Unless I'm laid up in bed or injured there's really no reason not to get out
• I always tell my clients, something is better than nothing. Take my own advice.
• Don't beat myself up over the past, what I didn't do, or what I should have done. Move on to the next day and try not to repeat the bad

Hello to a brand new week.

"Everyone wants happiness, no one wants pain; but you can't have a rainbow without a little rain" -Unknown

To a T

Not sure where/what ad campaign this was pulled from but loving the message. Fits my perspective to a T
'Run easy is an oxymoron. What is it about running that scares people so much? Why do people feel they have to put friendly modifiers next to running so everyone can feel good about it? Well, here's the ugly truth. Everyone shouldn't feel good about running. It's hard. It hurts. Running requires sacrifice and heart and guts. Any attempt to water it down with feel-good adjectives is a slap in the face to those of us who still hold running sacred. In fact, if you're running easy, odds are you're not running at all. You're jogging. So do us a favor, don't run easy. RUN HARD. RUN LIKE AN ANIMAL'

"Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out" -Robert Collier

How much do you really want it

A young man asked Socrates how he could get wisdom. Socrates replied, "Come with me."
He took the lad to a river, pushed the boy's head under water, held it there until the boy was gasping for air, then relaxed and released his head.
When the boy regained his composure, Socrates asked him, "What did you desire most when you were under water?"
"I wanted air," said the boy
Socrates said to him, "When you want wisdom as much as you wanted air when you were immersed in the water, you will receive it."



I found this on a fellow teammate's page on facebook and it totally moved me, so I thought I'd share it with you. How true.

Living on Words

It's been a while since I've blogged on a quote, mainly just due to not coming across any that really move me, but today warrants a posting. As I was perusing the web on this lovely Sunday afternoon, (because hey I have nothing better to do) I came across an interview on Lolo Jones http://www.womenshealthmag.com/fitness/lolo-jones-interview . Lolo is a 60m and 100m hurdler, and she is going to the Olympics to represent the U.S. in the 100mH. She is amazing to watch, I actually got to watch her up close win the 60m Hurdles at the Indoor National Meet this year--awesome. Anyways to the point, in this interview she sites the quote by Frederick Douglass, "If there is no struggle, there is no progress." I love that just a few simple words can provoke so much emotion and power. This one may be one of the few that can hold a candle to my absolute live-by Jack London quote.

I'll take Quotes for 1000

"Time is a created thing. To say 'I don't have time,' is like saying, 'I don't want to.'" -Lao-Tzu

Okay I have a slight obsession with my thoughts of the day/quotes. The thing is whenever I need an uplift or just reflection on what's going on in the moment, I open the email that says 'Real Simple Daily Thought' and there stands a almost seemingly perfect reply. Kinda bizarre but a very lovely surprise to say the least.Time is always a virtued entity for myself since I'm always doing something at every given moment. I work multiple jobs, I run (a lot), and I try to keep a somewhat balanced social life. Last week I had a coworker ask me where I found the time to run since I worked so much. My reply was that If you truly enjoy doing something you find the time. Funny thing is my favorite and most used excuse for the things that I really have no interest in at the moment is not having the time. Hmm maybe I should rethink that excuse and find another. Haha.

A not so Daily Quote

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer"
-Albert Camus

Just a thought

So I'm sent an email that contains a thought of the day. Sometimes I read them, most of the time I just trash it. But the one today kind of struck a chord with me in a few different aspects in my life, one definately being running. It said:
"We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies."— Roderick Thorp
I relate it back to the fact that I'm sometimes a little, ok a lot, hard on myself when I'm not performing up to par, but I'm working on it.