'Train Hard - Fight Easy...'
I am keeping a log of my training again… I haven’t recorded my running since I trained for the Edinburgh marathon in 2011… So that is four years ago now…!
With my super techy husband I have an XL spread sheet all marked out - rather than buy another notebook! - ‘Week One’s’ activities and times have duly been put into all the relevant sections!
It is very different to the days of my ‘rough book’ at school – I was just fifteen, and had just starting out in the ‘planning training’ world.
I used to write it all down, my plans, how and when I would run - in double Maths usually!
I’d pass the time recording my heart rate too; the time it was taken, and what the number of beats in a minute were…
My resting Heart Rate was always around 52 then, now it is around 42, and in my days of mega mileage and fast race times it was 32.
I once recorded it at 29 after a particularly ‘still’ yoga session… I practiced yoga for twenty minutes, at the end of each day… My cat Ferrit would usually come and sit beside me; she loved this time, and would sit purring involuntarily…
I loved Ferrit so much; she taught me about being still and relaxed. She was a ‘rescue cat’ and when she first arrived, she was a stressed little thing… She healed and healed, and became more and more at ease; but she remained a very good external barometer of my internal state, because if I was ever upset or tense, she would react by being sick!
So the rough book was where it was all recorded; I seem to remember its official use was for our rough work before going into neat in our exercise books… But as a first training journal it worked really well…!
I used to write quotes in there too… The three I remember most vividly are...
‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going…’
And
‘Train hard, fight easy…’
And
‘You gain through pain…’
On reflection I reckon these three quotes are how I have lived, they have made up the ‘watchword’ of my life… I reckon they might have softened around the edges as I have journeyed; I am trying to write that I live differently now; but do you know, I don’t think I do…!
I am me, my essence has always been there; the way I love to embrace a challenge and will not turn back when I know there is something to be faced, whether that is physical or emotional…
And all who have worked with me know that the core of my teaching is to go into the pain to clear it, to keep ‘training’ – ‘doing the work’ at all times, so that life emerges into sunnier planes and that when it is really hard, when you want to turn back this is the time to keep going into the unknown, into the void...
Leaping without a net and finding it was there all the time!