Hi everybody!!! I hope everyone is having a great week so far.

The time is narrowing down to when I’ll return to work and I’ve been trying my hardest to take advantage of what’s left of my summer by running as much as I can (but smartly) and reading all the blogs 🙂

There are so many good blogs out there (you can check out some that I follow ^^^) but it’s tough setting aside time to keep up with reading and commenting. I usually try to limit myself to 5 different ones a day or else hours will have gone by without me realizing lol!

Mental Toughness

Anyway, I’ve been keeping notes on ideas for blog posts and one of them I’ve been wanting to talk about is increasing/coping with pain tolerance. Funny that yesterday I was on twitter and caught Amber from PB&PRs re-tweet on an article written by VegaTeam (more on them later) titled, How To Overcome Three Top Mental Challenges In Marathon Training. It is a very well-written article that talks about dealing with Pain, Intensity, and Fear, three things I know I need help on.

The article first talks about how pain is functional or non-functional. When it’s the latter, obviously the runner should stop to prevent injury. But the article talks about how when it’s the former type of pain, we can use it and control it however we’d like. Ultimately, we decide how we want to interpret functional pain.

“The defeatist mindset interprets pain to mean this sucks, I obviously didn’t train hard enough and now I’ll never achieve my goal. The competitive mindset, on the other hand, interprets pain to mean my body is talking to me to either let me know I need to adjust some aspect of my activity or dig deep for that extra motivation to power through. Once pain becomes less of an enemy and more of an ally, you can use imagery (A.K.A. visualization) to power through.”

The second topic on the list is understanding intensity. Recently, Rae at Darlin’ Rae talked about how important it is for us to take our “easy” runs seriously and I thought about her words while reading the article. The article emphasize listening to our body cues and using that as a guide to determine intensity. I dig.

Finally, the article addresses coping with fear. This is a big one for me along with the first, pain. I like that article acknowledges fear as a real thing and not something easy you can just ignore. The article does state however, that like pain, it is something we can control and offers suggestions on how to do it.

1.) When negative thoughts creep in, review past accomplishments
2.) Turn fear into challenges
3.) Feel your fears but do it anyway

Check out the article for more details on the above. It’s a good short read.

Publicizing Your Goals

My buddy at A Fast Paced Life recently wrote about the disadvantages of announcing your goals. This immediately sparked my interest as you usually associate announcing your goal as brave and conducive to achieving said goal.

But Cardamom makes some good points.

“The researchers postulated that when people make their goals public, they receive praise and accolades just for setting those goals. Because they already received the reward (i.e., praise, attention), there is less incentive to fulfill the goal. Attention given to your public goal brings a premature sense of having already accomplished the goal by having your identity as a member of the group affirmed by other people.”

I nodded my head reading this thinking yeah, that does happen. But at the same time, I think that how important the goal is to the person, finalizing it–making it come to life, is a huge factor in how easily they are affected by premature praise. Some people aren’t comfortable with praise unless they know they deserve it.

Very interesting article and topic, and I’d love to know your thoughts. Make sure you read her full article here.

The Shake Debate

Finally, last Friday I wrote about a few things I would never in Hell-y Land try, one of them being shakes (i.e. Herbal Life, Shakeology, Advocare, Plexus, etc.). For the most part, people agreed that the abundance of these companies that promote shakes is a little exasperating (like one commenter on another blog said, there’s a reason it’s a multi-million dollar industry), yet there were some who were offended that these companies they like and endorse get bad reps.

I don’t know the details of every single product, one person was offended that I associated their company solely with shakes (they offer pills and supplements as well). What I do know and what I dislike, is that there are a lot of people who think that the only way they can get healthy, get faster, get thinner, get whatever is by spending a lot of money on something they might not even need.

I know quite a few people who really like some of these companies, who promote them, who use them in their daily life and have noticed positive changes. I have a friend who works for Isagenix in one of their main offices. I have multiple friends who are Herbal Life and Beachbody coaches. In fact, I stalk follow Robin @KneadToCook who is a Vega Sport ambassador. She’s so unlike me in many ways. She’s really fast, she eats really, really healthy (she’s vegan), and she swears by Vega Sport, a clean, plant-based, natural nutrition system. Her recipes using the product seriously make me salivate.

These friends are great people who I really care about and I don’t judge them on what they believe truly works for them. I just don’t think people can expect others to readily accept something they’ve never been comfortable with or are not ready to try. I can respect other’s opinions on their beliefs in a product no matter how much I might disagree, I’d hope they’d respect my viewpoint in return.

So there you have it, I didn’t mean to ruffle any feathers with my anti-shakes post last week. I honestly respect those who use them, endorse them, swear by them. Right now, it’s just not for me. Maybe that will change in the future as I keep seeing Robin’s Instagram pictures of her food, and maybe it won’t (because you all know how much I looove cooking–except not!) 😀

Have a great week friends!! We’re getting closer and closer to TGIF! ❤ , helly

–Do you struggle with mental toughness while running?
–Are you comfortable publicizing your goals?
–Thoughts on the shake debate?