A little help for the weary...

This is something that I found a while back and while cleaning up my HD tonight came across it. The timing is perfect as the winter blahs seem to got me down. Just thought I would share...

To be good at running, you need to work at it everyday. There are some days you run long. There are some days you run fast. There are some days you do both and race. But you do it everyday. There are no short cuts to this method. There are ways that you can maximize what you get out of this effort, but really, to get the best results, you need to work at it everyday. Likewise, in life, anything that you wish really to be successful at requires significant effort and sacrifice over time. There is no quick fix or cramming. You can not cram in training. The things you do outside of running, affect your running. In other words, how you eat, how much water you drink, how much you stretch, how much you sleep, abstain from substances that are bad for you affect your ability to effectively work and train, etc. Success is also built on the attention you pay to these needs. Likewise in life, no effort stands alone. Truly successful efforts are reflective of work from the entire day, over many days. When you are beat in a race, the people that beat you simply worked harder to win. Focusing on the talent of your competition is irrelevant and not fruitful. It is much more appropriate to focus on how you can improve instead. Talent is highly overrated in our society. Considerations of how much talent you have, or someone else has, is a self imposed prison. I have met few talented individuals in life. I have met many hard workers. Hard work will beat a lack of work despite how much talent there is every time. In life, focus on working hard. All good things come from hard work. Again, all things come from hard work. Hard work in running is reflected in sacrifice. It means getting up early and going for a run when it is dark and snowing out. It means going to bed when everyone else is going out. It means skipping seconds at dinner. Sacrifice is something personal to you. In fact, you probably are not sacrificing nearly enough because ultimately it means that when you step to the line you have no excuses other than you, your preparation and your execution. In life, to achieve a goal of great personal meaning will require you to sacrifice. There are two phases to competitive distance running: preparation and execution. Both are equally important. Regardless of how much you have trained, if you do not do it on race day, no body cares how well you trained. Regardless of how well you can execute on race day, it is a function of how well you have prepared. In life, the same holds true. Drinking lots of water is a good thing in both running and life. The best goals in long distance running are those with deep personal meaning. In this you will drive yourself to an edge that few will see. You will know when you are really going after it and working hard. You will know when you are executing poorly or ducking the pain of a hard workout. This motivation, while at times, may appear to come from external sources (coaches, competitors, a race), it really comes from within. Goals with deep personal meaning are ones that are aggressive, hard to attain, require commitment, sacrifice and are achieved long term. In life, the most important objectives are those that have deep personal meaning. Perhaps the best thing that can occur in a race is executing a race plan that gets you to about 2/3 of the race at a pace that is near your capacity. In other words, you have executed in a manner that has your body in chemical conditions that are not right. You are feeling a state that most people will only feel during severe sickness or death. In this moment, you have the ability to utilize the unique human endowment to CHOOSE and push like hell. Animals only do this in light of a greater fear (a whip, an other animal chasing them). In this moment, in this choice, we go to the edge and look over. The times we reach this point in the race are rare, and the ability to respond in this regard is even rarer. We often go out too fast, or too slow or fear the pain with that choice of pushing at that moment. In life, there are moments of great challenge. The weak will abandon the endeavor. The strong make the choice, they exercise their unique human endowment of choice and self awareness to become something greater. Regardless of how you train or race in distance running, you friends and family will still love you for who you are. In fact, they probably have little understanding as to why that 10 second difference in that race is so important to you. They will not understand that the difference between 4:02 and 3:58 is not only four seconds. It is all fast to them. They love you for the character that you are. The character that you are however includes the willingness to set a goal, sacrifice for that goal, and work for it. That character is part of the reason they love you. Other people will tell you that distance running is bad for you or something to the effect as to why it is bad for them (and hence you). The stories that they tell are true of course for them. Never let them build a limit prison on what you can and cannot accomplish. In life you will be told that there are things that you cannot do for no reason other than it being true for those that have constructed those walls for themselves.

I found it here I'm not sure who wrote it.