Roots: Grounding your running, mindfulness, health and wellness

ISSUE 5

Life is a rollercoaster filled with peaks and valleys. No one is living at the top the entire time, and its not meant to be that way. Everyone experiences the lows too, but its important to keep grounded during these times and realize that it doesn’t last forever.The highs and the lows each come with their own set of challenges and it’s important to stay grounded and aware through it all and remember that you are playing the long game…. Life is an ultra!Issue 5 is going to explore both of these extremes to try and help you stay level through it all. 

THE LOWS

I understand that not everyone can relate to that point in an ultra when your mind is telling you there is no way that you are going to finish. Flash back to when I was running the triple looper at Cape Chignecto…. I was 100k in to a 142k run, but all I wanted to do was hurl and go to sleep. No way I could run another marathon right? Well sometimes when things are looking impossibly hard and you really don’t think you can go on, all it takes is a few steps in the right direction. Then the key is to forget about how far you have left to go and just focus yourself on the present and what you can do to keep moving forward in that moment.There are often points in life where I’ll struggle feeling like I am not making progress, or that I really just don’t feel like getting out of bed today, or how am I going to make it through this week?! I’ve got no energy, and a ton of work to do. Enter the mantra “This is ultra training”. Feel free to substitute what ever your working towards “this is marathon training” or “this is 5k training”. Any time you can shift you mindset in a life situation to be able to tough it out, your training your brain to be able to tough it out in a race or training when it gets hard.And the cool thing is…. The more you do it, the easier it gets. Think of it like push-ups for your brain. Every time you have that mental battle it’s a workout and you get stronger. 

THE HIGHS

When your running for 30 + hours straight you will often find yourself fluctuating between feeling fantastic and feeling terrible (not too much time just feeling ok haha). If your not careful and lose sight of the fact that you still have a long way to go, you can get carried away go to hard and cause yourself to completely crash and burn. The key at this end of the spectrum is to proceed with optimism but always staying mindful of the goal. Sometimes if you hit the sweet spot you’ll be able to coast feeling great for longer and be able to cover more ground feeling better then if you were to give into temptation and let to pace fly with reckless abandon.Everything in life is going great, you’re feeling like you have endless energy and there is nothing you can’t do. Similar to running an ultra you want to lock in a cruise towards your goal. If your not careful and get caught up in the bliss of feeling fantastic you’ll look up someday and find yourself over committed and possibly spiraling down to a deep low. Its that quick burn out you want to avoid. 

IN CLOSING

In life as in ultras there are many highs and lows. When your feeling low, just hang in there and know that it’s not going to last forever another high will eventually come, you just need to stay focused, put one foot in front of the other and endure. When your feeling high embrace it and enjoy it, but don’t over extend yourself and cause early burnout.So that’s a rap for ISSUE 5. If you enjoyed it please let us know in the comments. Share this with someone you think could find this useful and Subscribe so you can get our next News Letter. Also let us know if there are topics which you would like to see discussed in future issues.