Rising above "demons and struggles"; my first half-marathon

March 20, 2016; I have finished my first half-marathon at EDP Meia-Maratona de Lisboa.

Now, wasn't I suppose to celebrate that right away? Yes, I was. However, I took me some time to seat down, get this post ready to publish and share.

The last two weeks I had some particularly rough times, both emotionally and physically.  My anxiety has been high and the physical symptoms hard to ignore on such a level that by March 16 it would have been very easy for me to cancel running this event.  But I didn’t.

Somehow, I was able to bounce back from adversity and disappointment - and this running event became a sort of an act of defiance against my demons and struggles.
YES, I did finish this race and completed my first half-marathon.
YES, I did overcome all the fears and all the pain that stroke me along the 21K running - and that tells me that I am stronger than all that afflicts me. 

It also tells me that one does not have to be born with mental toughness. Mental toughness can be acquired - and one does not have to go through a life-threatening experience to gain it because mental toughness can be acquired by learning.
The more you try, the more you learn.
The more you learn, the more mental toughness you gain.

And the more mental tough you are, the more resilient you become with stronger ability to focus when facing unexpected circumstances. You learn not to avoid situations but instead to address them.  My half-marathon experience is a statement of truth for this; when reaching 14K, I felt dead tired, hurting, crying and wanting to quit.  I stopped running but kept walking, trying to focus on moving forward. "Another step, just keep moving" I constantly repeated to myself. 
I gathered my strength and adjusted my pace, which gave me the ability to keep moving forward. 
Suffering, I reached the 17K milestone and there I finally heard my inner voice saying - “You can do this." - There it was; faith and trust in myself.  I could (again) believe in me, even when there was no one close by to boost my confidence.  And when running the final 4K, I was really enjoying the fact that every step, even full of pain, was bringing me closer to my goal.

 

The end of this story for me is that glory does not have to be noticed by others. 

My own glory on this half-marathon was to kept moving my feet, against pain, against fear, against frustrations... especially, against the idea that I would not be able to rise above and finish.

 

Oh YES, I've made it!

 

International Women's Day Doodle 2016: #OneDayIWill

Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try

While I have done athletic activities pretty much all of my life (from being a sports student in secondary school to a grown up with a personal trainer at the gym...), I have never considered myself to be a runner and, in fact, never loved running.  In more recent years and facing many changes in life, I came to the confronting fact that aiming at maintaining a healthier life style meant to start running. When I did so, I couldn't run 500 metres to save myself, but I was an efficient walker and so, kept slowly progressing. By March 2014 I took the challenge of running my first "mini-marathon"  (8 km)  and, far from feeling comfortable, I did finish it and felt really proud and excited of my achievement.  I was also very happy as I could see myself  dropping weight and feeling fit and healthier than ever before. From that moment I started to train in a more serious way, with continuous definition of targets supported by proper training plans from MyAsics.com. 
By October 2014, I had my first 10K official running finishing with the time of 1h16m. From there the training plans were set towards the goal of cutting time and about one year later, I got to my ever best 10K official race time; 1h and 18 secs ! That was November 2015. 

I can write many lines about happy and proud I was of my self - I could run better, stronger & faster cutting time and moving down, in one year, from 7m/km to 6.01 m/km. Instead, I'll just write a simple line; YES, major change is possible and YES, it will most probably cause pain. Changing is a step-by-step process and not a smooth transition - so, when the process is full of pain and frustration, how to find the motivation to keep on moving? 

Theories about change recognize that transforming deep-seated behaviors, attitudes or habit habits is difficult, and if such change is to be successful, certain conditions must be met both in design as well as in implementation. Intentional Change Theory framework underpins that successful development programs consist of five stages, where the 4th stage is practice, adjustment of behavior, experimentation and more practice.

So, only with constant effort, experimentation and practice new behaviors will emerge... just like running, a road to self-awareness and reliance even if based in a process where one is pushed to extremes and learns the harsh reality of its own physical and mental limitations. It is itself the journey to change (eg, the training) that fuels the way by offering dynamic goals that helps to bring out the best. So, "walk the talk" means pain, practice and practice and practice - that is the way to do it, to reach each of the smaller goals whilst becoming much closer to the final target. Same to say, "no pain, no gain".

Back to November 2015; a new short-term goal, simple and made in community - to run 10K in less than 1 hour and after that, start to train for the half-marathon! Be sure such words instantly mean "pain, pain, pain"- will I be able to do it? Let's see in next March.

For now here I am - exhausted but exhilarated in a moment where everything seems right, where pain seems just a collection of memories that somehow moved me closer to my target.  7 February 2016, 20Km, done !

The 2015 in review

The world in 2015 review:

Click for The Guardian recap of a year defined as "living dangerously" 

How to make New Year's Resolution really work

Do New Year's Resolutions really work?
Yes, it seems so; accordingly to Dr. Mike Evans, seems that you are more likely to stick to a change if you made it at New Year's. But, what is the science behind this when so many of us have made them and know they often don’t stick?

A study refer that only 8% of people who make resolutions suceed in keeping them - 75% of resolutions is continued through the entire 1st week of January however only about 46% make it past 6 months. This is according to the University of Scranton that lists losing weight was the number-one commitment, followed by getting organized and spending less (or saving more). 

Well, not the be the bearer of bad news, but if your New Year’s resolution is “get healthy and lose weight", you might be setting yourself up for failure, since those studies also indicate that true life change takes root when goals are short-term, simple, written down, and made in community.

One of the biggest keys in making changes in your life is to believe you are capable of growing & changing.  And YOU ARE ! But where to start?

First, you'll do better if you reflect beforehand, as Dr. Evans recommends, and more closely look at the behaviors you want to change. Most behaviors are automatic, done without thoughtful consideration; so, if you want to change habits, watch yourself more and look for the little decisions you make just before the autopilot takes you the rest of the way. Look at the contexts in which you want to change your behavior (eg, at work, at home, on the road) and on what triggers the autopilot behavior you want to change.
Plan before the next time you'll be in that particular context and do some creative problem solving: what is the easiest, best other choice you could make without too much frustration? How can you make that choice easier to chose? What tricks can you use to move your autopilot into a different path? If you do a bit of research, you can get even better answers.

On this short video lesson "How to Suceed with your New Years Resolutions" - available both on TedEd and on DocMikeEvans YouTube Channel, some simple tricks are explained and will help to understand how to facilitate change.
 
Mike Evans is the founder of the Health Design Lab at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, an Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of Toronto, and a staff physician at St. Michael's Hospital. He develops innovative health messaging for the world. Dr. Evans work has been profiled in a wide range of publications from JAMA to Walrus, and the hit Netflix series Orange is the New Black.

Finding purpose in work

Last Wednesday I had the chance of listening to Prof. Miguel Pina e Cunha in a key-note speach dedicated to the theme "What is your purpose?". Drawing from the Harvard Business Review article "From purpose to impact" (May 2014, by Nick Craig & Scott Snook) and from the story of the man that serves at the toll at Ponte 25 de Abril in Lisbon, this talk was about self-awareness and "big questions in life" that might move people towards finding their purpose ... not goals... not mission... purpose...
Money alone isn’t enough to push us to do our best - says Daniel Pink - author and expert on the nature of work, listing meaning and purpose as core motivators, alongside autonomy and mastery.

So, how to find purpose through work? Research from late 90's  (Amy Wrzesniewski et. al) presented evidences suggesting that most people see their work as either a Job (focus on financial rewards and necessity), a Career (focus on advancement), or a Calling (focus on enjoyment of fulfilling, useful work).

In the context of leadership, this process often results in more clarity about each leader's purpose, values, and motivations, and the role these play when that person is leading others. In this line, purpose is a choice and people have purpose in every job and profession; it seems to have more to do with attitude and approach than about the work itself ... In fact, we all can remember about people who work (for example) in medicine and don’t get much purpose from it as well as remember about people in the so called “dirty jobs” that, in turn, get tremendous purpose from what they do. 

Very often people get more purpose and enjoyment out of things when doing something that helps them master what they do, and, at the same time, feel like they are doing something that has an impact. Purpose seems then something that comes much more "along the journey", resulting from "trying and doing", in a process that allows one person to become aware of what matters for he / she, how does he/she learns, how does he/she wants to be challenged and how he/she wants to help other people; a gradual process that brings light to understanding what are the things which serves us well (eg, the ones we accept and commit to) and which ones do not (eg, the ones we need to commit to change).

The making of an expert - Gladwell and Ericsson and the 10.000 hour rule

There is a story that is usually told about extremely successful people, a story that focuses on intelligence and ambition. However on his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that the true story of success is very different, and argues that to understand how some people thrive, one should spend more time looking around them and at such things as family, birthplace, or even birth date.

Throughout the book, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-hour rule", claiming that the key to achieving world class expertise in any skill, is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing the correct way, for a total of around 10,000 hours.

Anders Ericsson is widely recognized as one of the world's leading theoretical and experimental researchers on expertise, sharing such view as you can read this article.

But Malcolm and Ericsson likewise also argue:  before practice, opportunity, and luck can combine to create expertise, the would-be expert needs to demythologize the achievement of top-level performance, because the notion that genius is born, not made, is deeply ingrained. It’s perhaps most perfectly exemplified in the person of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who is typically presented as a child prodigy with exceptional innate musical genius. Nobody questions that Mozart’s achievements were extraordinary compared with those of his contemporaries. What’s often forgotten, however, is that his development was equally exceptional for his time. His musical tutelage started before he was four years old, and his father, also a skilled composer, was a famous music teacher and had written one of the first books on violin instruction. Like other world-class performers, Mozart was not born an expert—he became one.