Apparently people liked my speech at the GSTC Banquet enough to ask for a written version of it! Here is my edited version: Erby’s 7 Tips for Post-Collegiate Success: 1) Priorities - A lot of people try to make their goals and then shape their priorities around them. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work. Define your priorities before you define your goals. Priorities don’t change nearly as easily nor as drastically as goals do. If a goal isn’t in line with your priorities, then it won’t happen. 2) Never Settle for feeling Just OKAY - You should never feel exhausted from training every single day - if you are, then you need to do less because you aren’t recovering and therefore you aren’t benefiting from your training. If doing less doesnt fix it, then you need to find a doctor who can help you get back to 100%. If all else fails, you probably need less coffee and more sleep. 3) Accountability - Create your own supportive system and environment of accountability. Most of us post-collegians can’t have a coach there with us every day, but having a coach is very important to holding you accountable to your goals. If you can’t have a coach and you need help making yourself accountable - tell anybody who will listen (significant other, friend, neighbor, co-worker, Facebook, Instagram) what you’re going to do. When you tell someone, it becomes more achievable. 4) Focus - Have a reason why you are training. In college we have 3 distinct seasons (2 for the non-distance folks) with major meets for each. Its pretty simple. Post-collegiately it’s too easy to get wrapped up in competing every weekend and never really prioritizing anything. You have to pick a target competition and be ready for all other competitions to be secondary to that one. Every day of training and every workout has a purpose, and sometimes it’s recovery. This is a crucial missing piece of understanding for a lot of motivated college runners. 5) Make your Competition your Team - I’ve belonged to a lot of teams, but it wasn’t until I started comprising my own teams out of my rivals that I really started to succeed. We run faster in a race than in practice because we have competition. Therefore, it’s the competition that makes us perform better, and if our goal is to be the best that we can be, then we shouldn’t be afraid of people who can push us or even beat us. Instead, we should seek out those people and the opportunity to compete against them. At Twin Cities 2013, I ran shoulder to shoulder with a good friend for 24 miles. We lived over a thousand miles apart, but called ourselves Team Love and decided on the course that anyone cheering for one of us was cheering for both of us. We both ran PRs of 2:34 and finished 3rd and 4th at the US Champs. 6) Joy - You have to have a good reason to be doing this because it sure isn’t for the money. My new tattoo on my wrist (see photo) is my reminder of why I do it: aus Liebe - out of love. One of my greatest moments of joy was the Boston Marathon this year. After a rough last few weeks of my training cycle, 2 nights before the race, I heard that cheezy pop song Best Day of My Life and decided it would be my theme song for the race since I knew what an incredible experience it would be for every runner that day. I totally bought in, decided it would be the best day of my life no matter what, and it definitely was. There will be days when you don’t feel like training, and accountability and priorities aren’t going to cut it to get you out there. That’s when you need to pull a joy card. This can be anything from friends, trips to different venues, music, or favorite podcasts. Ill often save podcasts for runs only, and when a podcast is really good, Ill want to listen to it so badly that it’ll make me want to go for a run no matter how tired I am. Grinding every day is not sustainable. You have to make sure you add a healthy dose of joy. 7) Give yourself a fighting chance - It doesn’t matter how much anybody else believes in you if you can’t believe in yourself. Remember the great things that you’ve done and know that it’s still in there in some form, eagerly waiting for the chance to resurface.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 01:38:32 +0000
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