Welcome to Running to Myself. I’m Trisha Stanton. Life and mindset coach, running coach and host of Running to Myself.
16 years ago I ran my first marathon. The process of training for that first race changed my life. This podcast is my opportunity to share some of the lessons I have learned about running and life through the many ups and downs of life during my almost 2 decades of running and learning more about who I am. It is my hope that through my stories maybe you will see a bit of yourself as well and find a nugget of truth and inspiration to take with you. Let’s get started.
Welcome to Episode 6 Race Day
Race day was fast approaching and as we prepared to fly to Washington D.C., I was experiencing a mix of nervousness and excitement. I had never been a spectator at a marathon, let alone an athlete, so I had no idea what to expect.
I was not prepared for what a large event this was going to be. The Marine Corp Marathon hosts a field of 30,000 runners on race day. Nicknamed The People’s Marathon, it is the largest marathon in the US that does not offer prize money. That is a lot of amatuer runners in one place!
We arrived Friday afternoon for the Sunday marathon. The city was alive with people. We enjoyed ourselves in downtown DC Friday night and Saturday, seeing some sights while also being careful not to do too much prior to race day. We also needed to figure out how to use public transit to get to the race. Everything about this experience was new and unknown. As nervous as I was, I really enjoyed our short day of being tourists on Saturday.
Sunday morning came early. It didn’t matter, sleep wasn’t easy to come by with all the pre race nervousness I was feeling. We made our way onto the train, careful to be on the correct route. Once we exited the train and found our way through the train station, we found ourselves in the sea of people making their way to the start corrals. We found our corral, squished ourselves in with the others and waited.There is a lot of waiting around prior to a large scale race and due to the amount of people participating you need to arrive plenty early to get into place. Even in the back corrals, there was so much excitement in the air. People were friendly and chatty as we all waited to finally hear the starting gun sound.
After what seemed like hours of waiting, we were off. Kind of. It began very differently than I had imagined. You see, it takes quite a while to get 30,000 people across a start line and we were appropriately way towards the back. It’s kind of funny really, in all the times I had thought about race day, I had never really considered all the other thousands of people who would be there. What I imagined the start would look like was us running across the start line holding a steady pace like when we ran our training runs. I had pictured this to be like a training run, only longer, because I had never gone a full 26.2 and with thousands of people doing the same. What I was not prepared for was it being so crowded that it would take almost 30 minutes to even get to the start line and then we would be basically walking because we were too crowded together to run. It wasn’t a terribly big deal. I was very open to focusing on what I had trained for while also taking what would come during the day. Fortunately I understood that everything would be new and different. I didn’t really have any expectations of how it should go. I just wanted to finish. If the training cycle had taught me anything, it was that each new distance brought new experiences with it. This was the ultimate of new distances. It was the culmination of everything I had been working for. The race itself was the reward. And new lessons would be learned along the way.
Dave and I had not had “the talk”. In other words, we had not discussed whether we would try to stay together the entire time or each run our own race. We did have a loose idea of where we would try to meet after the race if we were separated, but that was pretty sketchy because we didn’t know anything about where we would be after the race. I guess we just both figured, we would figure it out if we needed to. A couple of miles in, it was still very crowded and Dave, being more aggressive than me, found an opportunity to squeeze through some people and get out ahead a bit. I held back. What if I pushed my way through and then couldn’t hold the pace? Also, I just wasn’t comfortable with pushing my way through the crowd like he was. I didn’t worry too much. After all, it’s not like we would get that far apart in the sea of people.
I could not have been more wrong. I didn’t see him again until after we both finished the race. At first, he didn’t know I wasn’t with him. In the end, it didn’t matter. We were both too inexperienced to try to manage the other person’s race. Each of us taking care of ourselves was the best course of action. What surprised me the most during the race is how long it stayed crowded before I felt like I could move freely.
The first 20 miles went great. Being in a new city and seeing new sights while running an unfamiliar course was entertaining and made the time go by pretty quickly. I didn’t really begin to struggle until about mile 23. That’s when I hit “the wall”. I didn’t know how to fuel properly, so I imagine I was slightly dehydrated and also needing some calories. It would be several marathons before I figured out how to manage all that. And that’s to be expected. There is just so much you don’t know when you are first starting out. While there are general guidelines for fueling yourself, each body responds differently and on that particular day, there probably wasn’t anything that would have prevented me from starting to struggle around mile 23. My body had never done this. I was already 3 miles past the longest distance I had ever completed and still had 3 more to go. I was glad it was only 3, but let me tell you something, when the body decides it has had enough, 3 miles can take a looong time to complete! What took about 30 minutes during a normal training run stretched out to almost an hour at the end of the marathon.
At this point, my legs felt like they were filled with concrete. And aside from being really heavy to drag along they were beginning to hurt. At one point I decided to move off to the side and try to stretch a bit. What a mistake. Once I stopped, it was incredibly hard to get my body moving again. Not because I didn’t want to. It was actually a struggle to physically move my body. I was stiff from head to toe. Somehow I managed to get moving again and cover those last few miles. I was getting close to the finish. I was going to be a marathon finisher! And then I saw it. This couldn’t be. Surely they wouldn’t do this to us! My eyes did not deceive me. Ahead what I saw was one final hill before making it to the finish line. You have GOT to be kidding me. I pushed my way up that final hill and finally crossed the finish line. That was it! I was a marathon runner! I did it. I would love to tell you that Dave and I then ran into each other’s arms and celebrated. But what actually happened was that I suddenly needed to use the bath immediately and I could barely move my body to the port a potty line. I hobbled over to the long line and waited my turn to use the stinky port a pot. Finding my husband would have to wait. After what seemed like a long time, Dave and I finally found each other. He had made it through the crowd around mile 4 and finished about 10 minutes before me. The journey we set out on back in April when he signed us both up to run our first marathon was now complete.
Now what? Aside from the immediate pain and soreness that I was feeling, I didn’t feel any different on the inside. Don’t get me wrong, I was happy, very happy to have crossed that finish line. What I mean is, I was still the same person I had always been. I hadn’t suddenly gained superhuman athletic ability as I had for so long imagined that marathon runners had. I had just followed a plan and that plan led me to where I was right in that moment, a marathon finisher. Nothing about me was different, yet at the same time, everything was different. I had just done something that I had before thought was out of my reach. So far out of my reach, in fact that it had never even occurred to me to attempt anything like it.
Let’s jump to our Life Coach Connection. Completing that marathon created a shift in me that I still use as a touchpoint today when I am working toward a big goal. That experience, not the race, but the entire experience, from registering without understanding what I was getting into, to selecting a proven training plan and then following the training plan and trusting the process of getting my body ready and then finally putting it all together on race day, the entirety of that experience changed what I believed about what was possible for me, and for anyone really.
Prior to this experience I had what would be considered a fixed mindset about certain things, especially physical abilities. I believed that there were some things (like running) that you were either good at or you weren’t and if you weren’t born being good at something, then that was just something that wasn’t for you. I hate to even admit that now. It is so different from what I now believe!
Fortunately for me, the experience I had training and then completing that first marathon completely broke open my fixed mindset and I adopted for the first time in my life a Growth Mindset- the belief that you can learn to do things, you aren’t born strictly having the ability or not.
I came to believe (and I still believe) that anyone who commits to putting the training in can complete a marathon. This is not for super humans. It is for those who are dedicated enough to put the work in. That’s it. This outlook wasn’t contained to running. Running was just the thing that opened the door for me to look at life differently. I began to filter other ideas from this point of view. I began to wonder what else was possible if I followed a plan and committed to learning and pursuing new goals.
If I’m being honest, it took me a while to grow into this new identity. Mostly because it was so different from what I believed about myself before, but I thought about it a lot. What else was possible? I began to look at my goals as something to make a plan and take action to attain. If it had worked this time, it would work again, right? Before this, goals were more like ideas that I rarely took action on. I had been holding myself back without knowing it.
What about you? Is there an area in your life where you might be holding yourself back? I’m not going to try to convince you to sign up for a marathon or even to take up running as an activity. But I am going to challenge you to take an honest look at your life and your beliefs about what is possible for you. Is there a dream that you have let go of? What is that one thing that you have always been so curious about but have considered impossible for you. Have you ever stopped to consider that it just might be possible? I’m not saying that it would be EASY, but with the right actions in place, and the dedication to stay the course when it FEELS impossible, when it gets really hard and especially when you just want to give up, if you continue on in the face of all that, I guarantee you that you will blown your mind with what you CAN accomplish.
Attaining the goal you set is amazing, but it’s not the full reward. The full reward lies in who you become in the pursuit of your goal. Reaching for something you have never accomplished before will require you to become a new version of yourself. If it doesn’t, your goal isn’t big enough. In fact, if you can reach your goal without any change, it is not actually a goal, it’s just a task. Maybe you will do a little soul searching this week. Maybe you will see an area where having a fixed mindset about something is holding your back. Maybe you will decide to take the first step and just say yes to that dream that you have tucked away for so long. Are you ready to find out what’s possible for you? I hope so. I’m cheering on. I know you can do this!
That’s all I have for you today, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Running to Myself. You can find previous episodes on apple podcasts and spotify or on my website www.trishastanton.com. New episodes are released each Monday. You can select subscribe or follow on Apple or Spotify to automatically receive each new episode as it comes out.
If you know someone who you think would enjoy this podcast, please share it with them! I will be back next week to share a little more about my training journey on the road to discovering my truest self.
In the meantime, if you want to know more about my coaching program or have questions about life coaching in general, please visit my website at www.trishastanton.com .
Have a great week and remember, Mindset Matters!
