1. Going Downhill

Coach Daniel's 1st edition weekly pondering.

After 10 years of working in Public education, I left the classroom last week.

While teaching my 5th year of High School English, I was also building up this coaching business, usually from 7 PM to Midnight — that precious time after the kids went down for bed. Tired. Burnt out. Running on 5 hours of sleep average, I tried tackling my own running goals. I managed our new clients coming in (we’ve doubled in the last 2 months just by word of mouth!)… I did too much in too little time. It was the most I’ve ever worked; unproductive overreaching (The Garmin Watch of Life would have been a dick about it).

It was a 3000 feet of vert in 3 miles kind of 6 months. It was a full sprint up an unknown slope with a summit I just had to trust was somewhere worth being.

When I walked out of my school building without a way to buzz back in last Friday, I immediately went home and packed my truck for Colorado. My wife, in a moment of generosity, or maybe pity, agreed to let me have 5 days to myself to de-compress and detox from the pressure and poison of 6 months of learning, growing, and let’s call it was it was… grinding. I bummed around Leadville for 3 days and climbed up Mosquito Pass, the turnaround for the Leadville Marathon that I will race here in few weeks. It’s steep, a jeep road winding through derelict mines, formed on chunky granite tallus. You can probably anticipate where I might extend this into a life metaphor here so I’ll spare you, but needless to say, the grind and the climb suck.

But there is a place for it.

Every runner seeking the next big leap in performance knows this, but the brutal reality is that when you know you’ve reached the end of your climb, your suffering, you aren’t really done. You are staring down the barrel of the 20% decline littered with snow drifts that you just came up while cursing and now your ankles get to pay the penance. Working to the mountain top does not earn you a helicopter ride down. It earns you a new kind of challenge.

Mine is building our business to sustain my family. Mine is overcoming the crippling self-doubt that after 20 years of competitive running, 4 years as a high school XC/Track coach, a UESCA coaching certification, and 2 years of private clients, I’m still not qualified for anyone to pay me for this. Mine is learning Meta Ads and content making when it’s maybe the equivalent of sticking my head in a microwave and leaving it there.

Life’s a bitch. Suck it up. Keep going. Right? Well not exactly.

There is such an obsession with “the grind” in training these days. It’s like we’ve taken all of our workplace angst and finally found a vessel we can cram it into and double down on the torture we’ve made our modern lives into. We make each step a little harder than the last, and while I love a good brutal 1 mile repeat session or a vertical K climb or a dangerous ankle twisting quad thrashing of a descent, I think we forget to have fun far too often… Isn’t gravity beautiful? The churning of legs and flow state of finding your footing, that feeling that your feet are working one step ahead of your brain, making decision out of instinct? It’s terrifying in many ways, but it is pure action, and that’s where joy can sneak in. Joy doesn’t come in the overanalyzing and planning of perfect execution, it comes after when the decisions are in a flow that feel supernatural, out of your hands, pure instinct. But that instinct came from somewhere. It was both given to us and developed by our struggles. If we don’t acknowledge the totality of our most brutal experiences, we are liable to continue repeating the vicious cycle of toil without payoff, uphill with no descent. It’s not toxic positivity I’m talking about here either; sunshine and rainbows at all costs is just a path towards some unhinged mania.

It’s an intentional turning towards that which is good even when it might include pain and ankle twists and an occasional fall flat on your face.

Life is rich. Soak it up. Keep going.

I'm thankful for all of the clients who have helped get ReRun to this point. And I'm looking forward to the clients we will soon be connected with.