Today, I planned to go for a run. I got about half a mile in, and I noticed my hamstring felt really tight. I paused to stretch for a few minutes, warm it up for a bit, then started running again to see if that would make it feel any better. It didn’t.
So I turned around and walked home.
I’ll be the first to admit. I’m a pretty intense personality. I’m all-in, balls-to-the-wall, ultra-committed, and hyper-competitive personality. I grew up in sport, and have been conditioned all my life to “push through.” And you know what? I do. Often. But you know what else? Sometimes we ought to show ourselves some more gd grace and flexibility to change our minds or to honor what we know our bodies (and brains) need in the moment — regardless of what we had “planned.” I know LOTS of athletes who struggle with this. But one of the special skills that sport has endowed us with is the ability to know whether or not we’re tapping out because we’re UNCOMFORTABLE or because we’re in PAIN and what we are doing is no longer good for us. (Fun fact: this skill is applicable to 1,000 things beyond sport/fitness....) Thing is -- ONLY YOU CAN ANSWER THAT QUESTION. So if you ask yourself in that moment… “am I stopping because this sucks, or am I stopping because I honestly feel this isn’t good for me anymore?" YOU KNOW. Deep down, you know the answer to that question. It’s really, really tough to fool or lie to yourself. SO TRUST YOURSELF. You’re not going to gain 85 lbs by skipping one friggen workout. (Or a whole week, for that matter). Honor your body. Honor your mind. And cut yourself some slack every once in a while. It’s cool to be a gritty, all-in, gut-it-out, at-all-costs kinda person. But it’s just plain idiotic to blindly apply that mentality to every situation you find yourself in. So today — I didn’t run. And, you know what? That was “healthier” for me than in the 10ks I had originally planned.
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