I did it

Depending on how long you've been reading Midori Aura or following me on Twitter, you may know that I was training for a half marathon.

Well, it happened.

And I freaking crushed my goal.

All I wanted to do was run the 13 miles in under two hours, but my official time was 1:49:37.

I'm extremely proud of myself and even found a new hobby.

Which is a bit surprising...

Because a few years ago, I hated running and thought marathons were stupid.

I had never intentionally run over 4 miles before signing up for this race.

"BuT yOu PlAyEd CoLlEgE sOcCeR."

Yeah... except I was a goalie, so no one ever made me run.

It was definitely foreign ground to me.

Which, in a way, was a breath of fresh air.

Lifting weights in the gym has always come naturally to me.

The weight might challenge me, but the movement and process are second nature.

Not to say the gym became easy, but it was a comfortable stimulus - a full-on habit.

Running, on the other hand, offered me a brand new perspective and novel challenges.

I love a good challenge, so it was exciting to feel the rush again.

Lessons from running

I ran over 300 miles to prepare for the race.

The time that I spent training reinforced a lot of the ideas that I've had about doing hard stuff.

Not only did it reinforce them, but it also made me continue to practice them.

But they're applicable to nearly anything.

So let's dive in.

Just show up

This is genuinely the biggest one.

Listening to any great tell their story, you'll hear there were days they didn't want to do their workout or study, but they did it anyway.

There were many times during this training block I didn't want to run, but I ran anyway.

And for most of those workouts, running wasn't the hardest part - getting myself out the door was.

Progress isn't linear, and it doesn't have to be the same amount every day.

You always hear "1% better every day" in the echo chamber of self-development. But there's a reason that cliches like this are used so much.

As much as they're annoying, they're true.

It's not possible to inch forward on a day that you don't even show up

Just get into your clothes and get yourself out the door.

Even though you might feel like shit and the workout doesn't go well, you still moved the needle just by showing up.

99% of barriers are mental

Unless you've been on the floor, unable to move, you haven't pushed your body to its absolute limit.

Which then means that every time you've stopped something, it's because your brain told you to.

I had to relearn this just recently.

It was a workout that I pushed off into the afternoon.

I didn't sleep well, and I definitely didn't eat well the day before.

And my workout was the run I hate the most: tempo runs.

(That just means you hold a fast pace for a long time with no breaks.)

I definitely procrastinated hard, but I got myself out the door.

From the first step, I knew it was not going to be fun or easy.

And only 6 miles to go.

The whole run was a battle with my mind, and it was kind of nice because it made time go faster.

Until I hit mile 5.

My right quad just started to cramp, and I felt like keeling over and puking.

"It's okay to stop," I heard my brain pleading.

But it wasn't. I even found strength in the desire to defy my brain.

I had been training for so long that surely my body could outlast my mind.

And it did - shocker.

However, this isn't one of those stories where I tell you I felt great afterwards because I did my work for the day.

I finished up, walked in my door, crawled onto the floor, and took a 20-minute nap.

The only moral of this story was that your body can outlast your brain, and it's going to tell you to quit multiple times before your engine runs out.

Notice who is telling you where your limits are.

Things don't get easier

During my training, I went from never having run 5 miles to running 5+ miles four times a week.

You could definitely say that running 5 miles got a lot easier for me.

Well, yes and no.

Just because that distance became easier for me doesn't mean that the bar of difficulty dropped.

Instead, I moved so far over that bar that I could do it multiple times a week.

5 miles is 5 miles, and some people are still going to struggle to make it that far.

But this is where you need to give yourself credit instead of discrediting the activity.

Life doesn't get easier.

YOU get better and more skilled.

Thanks for reading, friends.

Don’t have much to say other than have a good weekend.

Until next time, with love,

Noah