Mind games + Vibrations of life

This is my second blog about my new running challenge to run 12 half marathon distance runs over 12 days and I want to share with you some of the things I think about when I’m running or just thoughts I have about running. Please let me know what you think or what goes through your mind when you run.

Lest week I was told by someone that I was mad to be doing so much running and gave me an example of a friend of this person who was a strong runner and athlete who in later life needed to have both hips replaced as a result of her running.

Now I’m not the world’s most confident person and there are times in my life when I’m full of insecurities and for about 5 maybe 6 seconds I doubted myself and wondered if my legs would fall completely off when I hit my 60s!

Then I remembered what a friend of mine once said; “never die wondering”

Andy is a very good runner and I mean “very good” and he has never let the metal bars which keep his ankle together stop him from living to his maximum.

He is @andywg on Twitter and like so many of my running friends on Twitter (you know who you are) has inspired me to; 1 keep going, 2 go harder and 3 never doubt my own ability. I can do this, YOU CAN DO IT. No matter what you want to do, don’t be told by others that you can’t have that, or that you’ll never become that person. YOU CAN.

 When I run those are the kind of positive affirmations I’m constantly saying to myself. I find my mind wonders through my past to my school days and I think about how some teachers more or less said I’d never amount to much as an adult. During careers counselling it was the same, but in the back of my mind I never believed them. I always believed in myself.

I often wish I could go back to my old high school and stand on the stage in morning assembly and tell the whole school this simple message, “always believe in yourself, no matter what anyone says; if you have a dream you must follow it, chase it down, grab the opportunity with both hands and hold on to it so tightly that your hands go red.

Self belief combined with hard work and the willingness to make sacrifice’s will get you to where you want to be, or help that person locked inside yourself break free.

Though I’ve said I don’t believe I’m the most confident guy, there is one thing which through the years has never changed and that’s my self belief.

For those that know me well you’ll know that I’m not someone who talks the talk but you’ll know that when I say I’m going to do something, you can take that to the bank. I don’t say something until I’m (fairly) clear in my mind that I can do it which is why I will give you a gold plated cast iron guarantee that I’ll run 157+ miles over 12 consecutive days in little over a month from now.

It may not seem like a huge challenge to some as I know a lot of great charity runners who go to extraordinary lengths for their chosen charity. People such as Mark Allison who in 2013 will run across Australia running about 41 miles each day! Now that’s impressive and I’m very proud to be running this years Great North Run as part of Marks team, catch him on Twitter @rungeordierun

But what I’m doing is hard for me, I’m not an elite runner, I’ve been working towards this since the start of December now and though I’m close to my peak fitness I know I’ve still got a lot of hard training runs ahead of me.
But I like to say that “nothing in life that’s worth doing is easy” and wanting to bring money in to the only children’s hospice in North Staffordshire and South Cheshire is worth the hardship and the long winter runs in the cold and the rain.

I wonder if people tell Mark Allison he’s crazy to run so much, and I wonder what he does to challenge that view. All I do to challenge them is to make it my life’s work to keep proving the nay Sayers wrong. I am so more then you said I would be!

This is a great running quote which I like “Most people run a race to see who is the fastest, I run a race to see who has the most guts”.

In 2005 I wrote “Vibrations of life” to describe to others one of the ways I feel alive and connected to life and I've added that to thsi blog. Please have a read.

And this is the link to my just giving account http://www.justgiving.com/6Townsrunx2

That’s one of the ways you can support me on my runs.

Thanks for reading and I’ll try to make the next blog a bit more bite sized and not such an epic.

Phil

Vibrations of life!

Planet Earth is rotating at a constant speed of over 1000 miles per hour.

We don't feel the Earth’s rotation because everything else is moving with us and because the motion is very smooth. It's kind of like sitting in a car and reading a book or playing a game. If the car is going very smoothly, with no stops or bumps, and you don't look out the window, you wouldn't know you were moving.

    Imagine if you could feel the vibrations of the planet spinning beneath your feet! Imagine if the further from home you travel the greater the vibration, and the further from your comfort zones you are the stronger the spinning gets; to the point that you have to hang on by your finger tips with the world rushing past you at 1000 miles an hour.

    Draw a circle in your mind, in the centre is your comfort zone, your daily life, the dull mundane of existence. Here you feel still and lifeless.

Move further from the centre point and travel out to the edges of the circle and feel the vibrations getting stronger, feel the pull of the journey, out here on the extreme edge of life is where we find the buzz, the adrenaline, the wanderlust, the reason for that existence. Out here we are truly alive.   

    Next time you find yourself in a new place, alone and far from home. Stand still for just a couple of minutes and feel the vibrations of your world rushing and swirling around you. Bask in the knowledge that you are more alive out here then you could ever be in the centre of the circle!

And when, at journey’s end you start to feel the vibration less, remember that day in a far distant land when you felt life coursing through your body, though you may find your self back in the centre one day. It will never be a comfort zone again, and you’ll not be afraid to venture out from that centre point when the call to travel takes over you once again; as it always does, time and time again…………..

©PDThomas2012