The 81st Edition

Honesty without perspective turns into self indulgent pessimism.

Something to Think About

Struggle doesn’t automatically equal failure.

Something to Ask Yourself

What actually went right this year that you’re overlooking maybe because it didn’t look dramatic enough?

Personal Lesson

I’ve seen a trend lately of people doing these “honest” year reviews online, listing everything that went wrong. The tone is usually something like: this year broke me. But when you zoom out, their year usually wasn’t a disaster. It was life. Some mistakes they made themselves and they could take blame for some things. Other things were completely outside of their control. The hard stuff they handled, adapted to, and moved through.

If I look at my own 2025, I could easily cherry-pick some negatives. I lost thousands through business mistakes. I probably left money on the table. I didn’t perform well in a single race the way I wanted to this year. I had setbacks, frustrations, doubts. By some internet influencer standards, that’s prime “authentic content.” But it wouldn’t be truthful and it certainly wouldn’t be the full picture. I learned a ton, I stayed healthy enough to train, I built things that still exist and are growing. I showed up consistently and maintained a positive attitude.

Have I had harder years? You better believe it! Do I think it’s worth focusing on what went badly or the struggles I faced? No.

This matters more than people admit. Even if my year had been objectively shit, making it to the end would still be a win. Getting through a year intact, with your values still pointed in the right direction, is not a consolation prize.

It’s the whole game.

Running – Life’s Metaphor

You don’t judge a training block by one bad session. You don’t call a year a failure because a few races didn’t land. You zoom out. You look at consistency, resilience, health, learning. Life works the same way.

Final Thoughts

Gratitude doesn’t mean pretending things were easy. It means acknowledging reality without dramatising it. You can have a hard job, an ill child, financial stress, or a life situation you wouldn’t choose, and still find solid ground to stand on.

If you can run, be grateful for that. If you can’t, be grateful for your health in other ways. If your health is struggling, maybe you have a good doctor. If you don’t, maybe you have the ability to change doctors. If you don’t, maybe you have supportive people around you. There is almost always a next rung on the ladder if you’re willing to look for it.

This isn’t toxic positivity. It’s responsibility. It’s choosing not to narrate your life as a tragedy when it’s actually a complex, imperfect, often beautiful process of adaptation.

Some things will be hard and some years won’t look impressive on paper. Some races won’t go to plan. That doesn’t mean the year was wasted. It means you were alive, involved, and learning.

If you made it to the end of 2025 still curious, still moving and still trying, that’s not failure. That’s a huge win.

Here at That’s Runnable we seek out the positives, we look for what is possible, what is good, what is doable, what is Runnable. We choose to look at things with Love and Optimism, not Fear and Pessimism.

So, look forward to 2026, and no matter what challenges await you, say:

That’s Runnable.

Thanks for reading and subscribing!

Run the runnable, and keep showing up for yourself.

Tommy 🙂