Today’s 10 miler was tough. Really really tough.

This is not me. I pulled this off the internet. Thank you internet.

I can blame a whole lot of things. Having the flu a week ago and missing 8 days of training is the main culprit. But I know many of us are having serious, how shall we say, GOAL BLOCKING with our training hopes right now.

Maybe you live in a ridiculous state that the polar vortex has targeted like a hit man in a Sopranos episode and you’re left with the options of either taking your life in your hands and navigating the snow and ice or spending hours on the hamster wheel (aka treadmill).

Maybe you’re like me and you had the flu. Or maybe your kids have had the flu and have been home from school so you can’t run. And yeah, the dozens of snow days aren’t helping there, either, are they?

Bottom line, it’s been a tough season. It just has. If you’re training for the Princess half or any races coming up, you might be feeling a little stressed. Or maybe those bold goals you set on January 1 feel like a distant memory eaten up by gray cold days and endless demands on your time and energy. And it’s amazing how only a few missed runs can seemingly take us back MONTHS in our work towards our goals (at least it seems that way).

So I want to reassure you tonight that you’re not alone. There’s a whole bunch of us who find our training not what we’d hoped it would be. Our bodies not responding like we wanted them to. Our schedules and job and family demands and snow days destroying our training schedules one postponed run at a time.

But you know what? We’re still runners and we’re still amazing. Because we maybe have weeks or months that don’t go as planned but then we have seasons that DO. And even if we don’t for a long time we’ll keep trying. Because we are tenacious like bulldog. And strong like bull. And beautiful like gazelle (I said all that in the voice of Kate McKinnon playing Russian peasant woman on SNL. Go look it up. Greatness.)

And we can do it. I believe in us. And when we run we feel, as Ryan Hall says, “God’s good pleasure” because we are gonna keep working hard and keep moving forward and keep overcoming setbacks. Because there will come a day when we can no longer run. But TODAY IS NOT THAT DAY!

Happy Running.

Jen