I have had many people ask me how my week of rest has been going. While I am excited that people are actually reading my blog (thank you to those who do!), I am sad to report that it hasn’t been going very well. While my body has gotten the physical break from workouts, my mind has not.
Like I mentioned last week, I feel like my life is in a bit of a lull at the moment. I’m just kind of in a funk…and I think I have started to figure out why over the past few days. I owe this little “aha” moment to a small calf injury, a long bus ride, and a surprise visit from Victoria.
There are times when I get in the middle of a race and it seems that the harder I try to push my body to go faster, the more it resists. I try to force myself to run harder and it says no. I have found that if at this point, I take my finger off the panic button and allow my body to relax and reset, I am able to make the pace change that I wasn’t able to make when I was trying to force it to happen.
I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone, but basically, my point is that I have been trying to force a lot of things in my life lately. Being a Christian, I put my faith, my hope, my trust in God. I believe that God has a plan for my life and I need to relinquish my desire to be in control of my life and trust that his plan is bigger and better than anything I could ever imagine on my own. By trying to control my own life and force how things are going to go, I am not fully trusting that the Lord has my back.
I think the funk in my life has come from trying to force my running and force my faith. While I have been saying the right things about training and letting the Lord do with it what he wants, deep down I have been holding on to the control. I so desperately want God to be in control of my running that I am not giving him the space to do just that. I have been trying to force God into my training instead of relaxing, taking a step back and just letting God do His thing.
I have noticed over the past few weeks that I have become pretty defensive about my training and worrying about whether or not I am doing enough. I feel like I have to defend it and prove to people that I am truly committed to this whole training thing. I look at other people who are training for the Olympics and compare what I am doing to what they are doing. Suddenly, my training has no longer become about my faith, but about making sure that I am good enough for other people’s standards. Major red flag!
So here I go, relaxed and reset…no longer forcing it…or at least trying the best I can to not force it. Knowing that I can’t do this on my own. Knowing that I need my God, who knows better than I, to use my running for His glory. I will train as hard as I can because anything less than that shows doubt in the Lord’s plan for my life not because I need to prove to other people that I am committed.
We sung this song in church tonight…it may get the point across better than all the stuff I just wrote.
Funny, I wrote pretty much this exact blog post a few weeks ago with the same video and everything
When I was writing it, God reminded me of this:
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things.
I thought maybe I was supposed to share it with you…
Hope it helps!