An Inspirational Journey
Last weekend I finished the Rocky Raccoon 100 miler in Texas (north of Houston) with a time of 26:44:52. This was my 7th 100 miler completed and my 88th marathon I’ve completed since my first marathon I completed 9 years ago. My current goal is to finish 100 marathons by the end of 2023 (only 12 more left).
The Rocky Raccoon course was filled with many roots, muddy spots and bridge crossings, but also had some nice runnable sections too. There were some nice views of the lake and mother nature at its finest while you ran the 20 mile loop.
It was great having my brother Chris crew me for the race and even better hanging out with him and his family in Austin! It was great running some trails with Rebecca Scott (who completed her first 100 miler) and with all the many others I met during the race. Seems like everyone I spoke to were from all over the country as the race had a large turnout.
I did not complete my very first marathon and I did not complete my first 4 attempts at a 100 miler. However, I didn’t give up. Just like anything in life, I had to learn from my previous experience and focus on improving things to finally get things completed. No matter what you are going through or doing in your life, set and focus on your goals and do your best to stay on the positive side of things and keep pushing forward. If things don’t turn out the way you wanted at first, don’t quit. Learn from it and use your experience to get better and improve things.
To me, finishing a 100 miler is much more of a mental game than anything else. Negative thoughts might pop up that will try to convince you to drop out or say you can’t run/walk anymore, but a little later on you might feel normal again and realize that you can push forward and that it was just a negative thought trying to bring you down. One simple thing I have learned that really helps me whenever a negative thought starts to enter my brain is that as soon as a negative thought starts to fill my brain, I quickly tell myself “nope” and change my thoughts to something positive. I find myself smiling or laughing at myself thinking things like “good try” to the negative thought that was just attempting to bring me down. I’ve got a lot of miles to go in my life so I’m going to push forward and not let any negativity bring me down. I believe this applies to anything in life, and not just running.
