I’ll never forget the night before my first marathon.
The server at the restaurant called us masochists.
Maybe he was right. Who voluntarily runs 26.2 miles?
My friend Jonathan and I did. We trained through frozen mornings and 20-mile practice runs when Netflix felt much more appealing.
"Year of Grit" became our mantra. Push through the hard stuff.
It worked. We finished the marathon.
But something unexpected happened: everything else got easier.
Client calls that used to terrify me? No sweat.
Hard conversations I'd been avoiding? Just another training run.
5am wake-ups for my side hustle? Bring it on.
It turns out there's magic in doing voluntary hard things. They make the involuntary hard things feel like warmups.
I can relate to this! I ran my first marathon in November and a few weeks later moved across continents -seemingly unrelated, but running definitely gave me a strange sense of confidence and perseverance.
Running my first Marathon in less than 10 days so I can relate to your words here. 😊