Finding My Tenacity...

Joy here…When I was growing up, I had quite the reputation for being stubborn.  My childhood nickname was "Bull Head" because of this trait, and even now as an adult, my husband tells me that I sometimes suffer from "dogwithabone-itis," in not being able to just let things go.

Was that "bull head" or "bowl head"???
(c. 1977)

I am, in a word, tenacious.

But somewhere along the way to adulthood, I've kind of lost some of that tenacity.  I've become a lot softer in my old age, a lot more relaxed, and a lot more chilled out.

Which also means that I'm a lot more prone to failure.

Over the last year or so, I've grappled with these failures within the realm of sport, but it is my firmly held belief that sport is a metaphor for life and it is a way for us to come face-to-face with the things that we need to grapple with in other aspects of our life.  Put simply, if something is going awry in our sporting life, then there's a good chance that there's something we need to explore a little closer in the rest of our life.

In my case it has been my failure to commit, my lack of tenacity.

I've whinged and whined, moaned and complained, and generally come up with every excuse in the book to explain my lack of sporting and training prowess of late.  I've been too busy.  I've switched sports.  I've moved to a different country.  I've travelled too much.  It's been too hot.  While each individual excuse may hold water, when I look at them all strung together like that over the course of 2013, I can't help but see the many cracks and leaks, causing a bit of a deluge.

So as 2013 comes to its close, I've had to have some good, hard conversations with myself about this issue.  My coach and I have identified it as the most crucial thing to work on over the next 3 to 6 weeks.  And let me tell you, for someone who has 4 university degrees and who has spent a quarter of a century in school (not counting when I've been a teacher/professor), it is rather humbling to realize that the problem here isn't my fitness or my body, but rather my brain.

Hmmmm…I don't think I can share the road with this guy!

I headed out the door to hit my Saturday 10 X 1min. repeat run workout, and came upon a situation that stretched my newfound desire to reconnect with my tenacious self.

I had planned to do this workout in our neighbourhood, but about 3 minutes into running around the neighbourhood streets that were in the middle of being re-tarred told me that I'd have to revise my plan. The smell of hot tar under the Malaysian sun, the many trucks blocking the roads, and the sticky stuff on the bottoms of my shoes let me know that there was just no way that I'd be able to stick to my workout in the neighbourhood.

Now what I normally would have done is thrown my hands up in the air, admitted defeat, and headed home for a relaxing nap on the couch.

One of 5 tar trucks clogging my neighbourhood.

But instead I grabbed my mace and my iPhone and headed out of our gated and guarded neighbourhood, back to another route that I've used before and knocked off my workout exactly as planned, heading home full of my success and tenacity.

And then the next day when I got ready to head out for my 40 minute easy run, I realized that I had left my running shoes to dry in the sink after trying (mostly in vain) to get the sticky road tar off them and they were still wet.

Again, I would have normally decided that the karmic gods were telling me to accept failure and put my feet up.  Instead, I dug through the cupboard and found my old running shoes, put them on, and out the door I went to knock off yet another workout.

My regular pair of shoes drying out, and me luckily digging
through the cupboard to find my old pair that still work in a pinch!

So while one week's worth of completed workouts does not a tenacious lady make (yet), at least they set me on the path to tenacity…

Over and out,
Joy