What does all this look like in reality?

Last year I ran the marathon. Usually you’ll want to follow some sort of marathon training program for a good 5-6 months or more. The thing is I didn’t. To understand the context more, travel back in time to March 2020. Yes, that infamous month. I was in a state of wander, pretty lost about what was going to happen, where I was going to be, was I going to have a job, am I being healthy. All these questions and more came to mind. From that state of doing nothing for no real purpose, I was like “what if I ran?” I saw some people on social media doing it to get outside and get fit. So I drove down to a nearby park and ran for a mile and a half. I was gassed. I then did that more consistently and increased that to a couple miles by the time I moved out of Atlanta in July 2020. Over the span of a couple of years, I gradually increased my endurance to being able to do 5, 10, 15 mile runs consistently. I was running 2-4 times a week. Then on Friday, September 2nd, as I was seated on my toilet, I saw someone’s Instagram story promoting the Around the Crown 10K that was happening just 2 days later. I said “screw it, let’s do it!” So I registered still seated in the bathroom, picked up my race day packet and bib on the Saturday and then made my way Sunday morning to the starting line near Truist Field. The race adrenaline is definitely real. After finishing the race, I said I wanted to have more experiences like this. A couple of weeks later, I saw that the Charlotte Marathon was happening in November, so I jumped on the opportunity before ticket prices got too high. I spent the remaining 6 or so weeks training with that goal in mind of finishing the marathon. I ultimately did finish the marathon with it being one of the proudest accomplishments in my life so far. (Peep my Instagram feed to see the last 30 seconds of the race!) Now 9 months later, I don’t think I’ve even run for a total of 26 miles since then. I don’t think that’s bad, it just is.

Now I don’t say all this to say this is the best way to do it. This is just the way that, looking back, was the way that ended up happening. And I’m deconstructing what happened. So what actually happened conceptually? I was in a state of Wander in the spring of 2020. That translated to Wonder as I started going on short runs. I loved the process of running so much just because. I continued that for a couple of years. Then there were some tangible goals that appeared in the form of races in 2022. I said Yes! That Wonder shifted to Drive because there was some purpose. Now after the marathon, I’ve run probably an average of once a month, if that. That Drive has shifted to Rest. This is the process of Wander → Wonder → Drive → Rest in action.