The 70th Edition

I’ve noticed something lately, both in people I coach and in myself. We’re all so easily flustered. One small thing goes wrong and suddenly everything feels like it’s falling apart. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed sometimes, which isn’t fun, so let’s talk about it.

Something to Think About

If you keep telling yourself it’s too much, it will be.

Something to Ask Yourself

Are you training in a way that adds stress or helps you handle it?

Personal Lesson

In the last few weeks, I’ve been dealing with something pretty stressful. It’s private, but it got under my skin – deeply. That kind of low-level anxiety that hums in the background all day. I kept trying to ignore it, to outwork it, but it just followed me around. Eventually, I had to face it. And when I did, I realised something simple but uncomfortable: most of my stress wasn’t from the thing itself, it was from my reaction to it.

I see this in training all the time. People panic when things get hard. They tell themselves they’re behind, they’re not fit enough, they’ve ruined their week. But that panic response does more damage than missing a session ever could. If you meet every challenge with “this is too much,” your body and your mind will believe you.

Running – Life’s Metaphor

Running doesn’t remove stress, it teaches you how to move through it. Every hard hill, tough session and long run is practice for life. It’s you learning not to crumble when things get difficult.

Final Thoughts

Training shouldn’t be another item on your list that overwhelms you. It should be the thing that clears your head so you can handle the rest. It should make you sharper, calmer, more resilient.

Many of us live in cultures where being “stressed” has almost become normal. But it doesn’t have to be. I, personally, refuse to live the rest of my life as stressed as I have been in my early adulthood at times. I believe limiting stress should be a life goal. To slow down. Do the thing in front of you. One run, one rep, one email, one conversation.

This isn’t me just sitting on a high horse and telling you to “chill out.” I am often the worst for it. I can quite easily do too much and suddenly end up feeling like it’s all too much and I can’t handle what I’ve put on my plate.

But when we approach training with patience, it changes the way you approach everything else. You stop rushing. You stop catastrophising. You realise that you can get through things by just showing up and doing what needs to be done. That’s all running really is: showing up, moving forward, not giving the noise too much attention.

If you can get comfortable being uncomfortable on a run, you can do it in a hard conversation, at work, or when plans fall apart.

We don’t train to escape life – we train to handle it better. And once you start seeing it that way, “too much” starts to feel a lot more manageable.

Thanks for reading and subscribing!

Run the Runnable!

Tommy 🙂