scarcity and weekly miles

One of the things I love about dailymile is that checking out weekly and monthly mileage totals is a breeze. Want to see how many miles you ran this month versus last month? Click. Want to look at the graphs of your weekly mileage over the year? Click. Want to see how you compare to everyone else? Click.

Want to know something I hate about dailymile?

That checking out all of those weekly and monthly totals of your own and your friends is so easy.

I decided I would check out "how I did" in February. 126 miles. Last year I ran 181. My mind automatically leapt to "Oh crap! You have really messed up your training, and you have a 50k to run in two weeks, and you are going to totally eat it because your total miles are so much lower than last year. What were you thinking!!"

That's my gut shot reaction.  And I might have responded by racking up the miles to correct for what I perceived to be a lack in my training. I've certainly done that before. Of course, that's just asking for injury, but it's a response I have made many times in the past.

I'm trying to be smarter this year. After all, all those big miles last year resulted in one crapfest of a marathon. I'm looking instead at the quality of my runs, the consistency of my training, and my general feeling towards running. I'm running with joy right now. That's all I need.

I stumbled across this passage quoted from "The Soul of Money" by Lynne Twist in Brene Brown's book "The Gifts of Imperfection". It captures perfectly what I'm talking about - that feeling that we need to do more and the idea that is is a choice about how to view the world that we can actually make. I think it applies as well to running as anything in life:

"For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is 'I didn't get enough sleep.' The next one is 'I don't have enough time." Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don't have enough of...

Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something...

We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mindset of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency...Sufficiency isn't an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough."

Are you looking at your training and finding it coming up short? Are you caught in the comparison game? Perhaps you just need to step back and let yourself feel that it is enough just as it is...