Kerri On Down The Road

 For so many years I had held the belief that decisions I made would lead to an outcome that I would be then locked into.  A sense of permanence around choices in my life and the place that they would lead me.  This binary, locked-down thinking resulted in a lot of hesitation and indecisiveness throughout my life, as it put so much weight on every decision and choice I made.   I remember speaking with a coach about this, as we tried to unravel the reason behind my five-year plan becoming a six- seven- or eight-year plan due to my inability to act.  She asked me to picture myself on a walk in the forest, faced with three different paths to choose.  Looking at each, it would be hard to know exactly where they were going to lead to, so I would need to just choose and start picking my way along one of them.  She asked me what I would do if I realized that the path I was on wasn't suited to my hiking abilities.  I told her that I would simply turn...

 It struck me the other morning as I was on a walk.  This realization of where I am now in comparison where I thought (or assumed) I would be only a few years ago.  And don't get me wrong, these thoughts were not accompanied by a sense of sorrow or regret.  What I felt instead was more of an awareness of just how much has taken place and how many choices and decisions I have made in that rather short span of time. Mind-boggling.  Let me ask you, when was the last time you stopped and gave yourself a pat on the back or acknowledged the work that goes into living our lives each and every day?  And stop yourself before you shrug and find a reason to downplay the work.  Instead, pause and think about where you were a month, six months, a year, a few years ago and then contrast it to where you are today.  Sure, there may be things that are not in your life now that you miss or wish were still there, but as you let go of that can you find evidence of th...

 I hadn't planned on writing a post about yesterday's half-marathon, but sometimes life/the Universe provides you with material that you just cannot ignore.  So here is a story of yesterday's race. For the past three months I have had a training schedule attached to my fridge door outlining my training plan for yesterday's race.  Dutifully each week I looked at the plan, laced up and ran when I needed to and even rested when I was supposed to.  All according to plan.  I started to ride my bike a lot more and felt that the cross-training this provided was helping me with cardio endurance and mental endurance as well.  Another check in the books as far as training and preparation goes.  Although my diet has leaned towards being healthy for the most part, I even made some tweaks there and started to embrace a plant-based diet which also felt like it was contributing to better physical output and recovery.  Check, check, check. As race day approached,...

 Earlier this year I started a daily practice of writing down three things that I was grateful for.  I try to do this without thinking too much - just write down what comes to mind as soon as pen hits paper.  By allowing my thoughts to flow I find that I am often surprised at what I end up writing down.  Today was no different.  As I was writing my list the last one that came to me was "I am grateful for the injuries I have had because they have taught me how to heal" - and I sat with that for a few moments.   I am training to run a half marathon in a couple of weeks, and for those who have known me on my running journey, I have sustained a couple of pretty decent hamstring pulls that have sidelined me from races in the last few years, and those injuries stemmed from ignoring the clear signals that my body was sending me.  SLOW DOWN.  GET MORE REST.  BE GENTLE WITH YOURSELF.  YOU DESERVE TO BE TAKEN CARE OF.  Instead I pushed p...

 I stumbled across a LinkedIn post today that really resonated with me.  The author was sharing an experience he had with keeping commitments to himself.  He set a goal of running every day; inevitably the day came when he wasn't feeling 100% and questioned whether or not he would be able to keep his commitment.  The internal battle began about what it meant to not hold up this agreement with himself, and that was when he had a breakthrough.  He realized that the daily run was a means to a very different end - he wanted to be on the nearby beach and to put his head in the water.   His conclusion was that the act of running was less important than the experience of being in the water, so he skipped the run and indulged in what he was being called towards. As I read his post, I couldn't help but not my head as I have lived that experience more than once in my life. The biggest difference being that I haven't always been able to get to the place where I a...