Dream, Believe, Achieve

This morning saw me surpass another milestone, which 9 months ago I would have thought simply impossible.  I am constantly amazed at how things have evolved and goals have tumbled since I started this 12WBT program.  When I first started I could not even run the full kilometre for my time trial.  My time was 7 minutes and 14 seconds.  Some of you will no doubt look at that and wish you were doing that now, but never mind, stick at it and you will surpass that.  What is important is that you never stop trying and never stop setting yourself goals.

When I started this program on the 4^th June 2012 I hated running.  Always had as a matter of fact even when I was super fit as a young adult playing football.  Probably because I was forced to do so in order to stay fit.  When I started the 12WBT I decided I wanted to learn to run again and started Michelle’s LTR program.  Don’t ask me why, maybe it was because Michelle said it was the best way to burn calories.  I like to find the easy way to do things apparently.  Little did I know that it might be the easiest way to burn calories but that is where the easy stops and the hurt begins.

Over the course of the last 9 months I have managed to gradually improve my running, in both time and distance.  I have been setting myself goals along the way, slowly working towards them.  Sometimes I would take a few steps backwards whether it be due to injury or confidence, but still work towards my goals.  I was very fortunate that I met up with a couple of awesome ladies in our local training group that were also runners and they have helped me stick with the constant weekly running, keeping me honest, accountable and running with me.  This has made it a lot more enjoyable as well as we can and do go out together when we can.  I am happy to say that my distances have increase gradually to the point where we ran around the lake near my house a few weeks back for our week 12 milestone which is 7.2kms.  This was our longest run to date.  What a sense of achievement we felt after doing that.

This morning saw me rise at 5:45am, yes I know what the HELL was I thinking, to head off to meet my running buddy Dayna at the Tan Track in Melbourne.  I had only done this once before and it is 3.8km long with one mother of a hill.  Anderson St hill is 500m with an incline of nearly 30 degrees and we were going to do this twice.  Another what the hell was I thinking moment.  Well we managed to get up both times without stopping or even get close to stopping and we even decided we would continue running at the end of our 2 laps until we managed to click over to 8kms for the run.

OMG, what a massive achievement and massive win for both of us.  It was not only the longest run we had both done, but the longest time of continuous running for us in 59 mins and 35 seconds.  There is no way I would have dreamt it possible 9 months ago that I could run for 1 hour without stopping and still feel good about it.

So with this all done and dusted and me thinking of my next goal, I want to highlight a couple of key points here that I have learnt from the 12WBT.  It is important to set goals.  Don’t shoot for the stars straight off, but have goals you have to work towards.  These will keep you focused.  They also don’t have to be scales related as this can just bog you down.  I start with small goals, like to run 1km non-stop.  I then worked up to 3km and finally 5km.  You also need to think about how you are going to achieve these goals and remain positive that you are heading in the right direction and can/will get there.  Once you start to tick off these goals you will have so much confidence and you will be wondering what you can do next.  This is exactly where I find myself now and I have been wondering if I should be putting a half marathon down on the bucket list.  Why not I say, it can’t hurt and my ultimate goal is to work towards a half ironman triathlon, which contains a half marathon, so I might as well start working towards it now.

Dream, Believe, Achieve.