Running should never become their entire life. I’ve always felt that self-discipline was the key to success in everything you do in life. I still do, probably more so today than I ever did. But, what has changed for me was the way that self-discipline was applied to not only myself but to the hundreds of people that I’ve coached over the years. In my early years of coaching, I was adamant that to get to the top was hard, but staying on the top was even harder. It demanded, or so I believed a ‘24/7’ commitment. The message I was delivering was “To be the best, everything in your life must be geared to get you there.” Two things happened to me in the first few years of my coaching career that changed that thinking. In my early days, I had some very talented girls who ran for me at St. Patrick’s School. They were all great students who would go on to have very successful lives later in life. The one thing they all had in common was a desire to be the best in everything they did. The harder they worked, the harder I pushed them. Surprisingly, one day, one of these girls came to me and told me, that after talking it over with her parents, she was quitting the team. At first, I was surprised and felt she …show more content…
It’s your choice and you can always do it the next day. However, when, due to an injury, you’re unable to even jog across your living room, it becomes maddening. It’s like having withdrawal symptoms from a powerful drug. The year I was unable to run, was one of the worst years of my life, both physically as well as mentally. Running, at that point, was pretty much my whole life, and when that was taken away, I essentially had nothing left. In addition, you become so ‘bummed-out’ over not being able to do what you love, everything else in your life becomes tainted as well. I’m sure as miserable as I was, it had to be even more miserable for others to be anywhere near