Losing Sight of the Journey – or, What I’m Learning from Training for a Second Marathon

My profession as a personal trainer is all about GOALS. I help people set goals, reach goals, work towards goals. Most of the time, my clients have big goals.

“I want to lose 40 pounds.”

“I want to run a 5K.”

“I want to get strong again after this injury.”

And it’s hard when you have a big goal like that to break it down into smaller increments. That’s a lot of my job – helping my clients break down an overwhelming goal into small, incremental stages that are easy to accomplish.

No-one wants to wait, of course. Everyone wants to get to their end result NOW. It’s funny, especially with weight loss, a person needs to be ready to lose weight. You can give advice and help all you want, but if that person isn’t ready for change, nothing is going to work. So I’ve seen clients who have been unhappily overweight for years, and if I’m lucky enough to get them as a client when they are finally ready to tackle their goal, they want to do it right away.

But you know what I notice and appreciate about working with people who have those big goals? Being witness to all the awesome things that happen to them along the way to their end result. I usually dislike the word ‘journey’ when talking about fitness and health because I think it’s overused and kind of hokey, but it works here.

Being solely focused on your end result means you’re in danger of losing sight of the journey.

Think of it along the same lines as the adage to live in the present. If you’re constantly looking forward to what you’re striving for, you’ll miss so many amazing things. Things like:

Realizing you can do something easily that was always a struggle for you. It could be running up the stairs to your apartment, carrying a suitcase, or hoisting yourself out of the side of the pool. It’s such a gratifying moment when you realize your body is stronger, fitter, more ABLE, because of the work you have put into yourself.

Running (or walking, or biking, or swimming) a distance farther than you’ve ever gone before. There’s something about numbers – it feels good to see distances getting bigger and times getting smaller, especially when you are training for an event. My husband still talks about the first time he ran 10 miles – he considers it the closest he’s ever come to realizing why I love running so much. Three weeks later, he ran a half marathon, but it’s that 10 mile run that was part of his training ‘journey’ that he thinks of more.

Finding out the accompaniment to clothes feeling more comfortable is that you start to feel more comfortable in your own skin. Buttons reaching easily, zippers not getting stuck, clothes that were tight now feeling loose and comfortable. Ordering something online, only to find it’s miles too big for you when it arrives. 

I’ve started thinking about this idea of the journey and enjoying the path to your end result more since I’ve been training for my second marathon. It is such a long period of training, with lots of milestones along the way. I find myself getting emotional again as I hit those milestones, even though I’ve made this journey before. Things like maintaining my race goal pace while running up a hill. Running a long run that’s longer than a half marathon. These are moments I remember reaching the last time I trained for this race. I felt emotional and excited about them back then and I guess I thought that a little of the “been there, done that” kind of attitude might color the training journey this time.

I was wrong. (Happily wrong!)

Not only am I enjoying every little triumph and milestone along my way, I also find myself able to deal with setbacks a little better  – I know their effect on the overarching goal is not so dire. I made mistakes last time that caused me to get injured, both in training and from the marathon itself. This time around, I can use what I learned from those mistakes and those injuries to help prevent them and stay strong and motivated.

I’m more excited, too. The feelings I had running the streets of every borough of New York City three years ago were overwhelming, indescribable. Joyful and grateful. Whenever I have a really successful training run, whenever I nail a workout, or exceed where I thought I was going to fail, I enjoy feeling good about it and have the realization that it will be that feeling times a thousand when I’m running strong on Marathon Sunday. Whenever I have a workout that is hard, or slow, or something I have to push myself to finish, it makes me appreciate that I’m learning to deal with that now while I’m training, so when I reach the points during the 26.2 miles where my legs are heavy, or I’m in pain, or I don’t think that second wind is ever going to hit, I can reach into the strength I built along the way, on the journey to running the marathon, and know I can do it.

What are you working towards in life right now?

Are you losing sight of the journey? Or are you enjoying the moments along the way?