{"id":4701,"date":"2009-08-25T10:01:33","date_gmt":"2009-08-25T14:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nomeatathlete.com\/?p=4701"},"modified":"2020-04-14T14:37:31","modified_gmt":"2020-04-14T18:37:31","slug":"excuses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nomeatathlete.com\/excuses\/","title":{"rendered":"Excuses are Like Booties"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Excuses are like booties.\u00a0 Everybody&#8217;s got one, and they all stink.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This is what the teacher of a songwriting course I took in college used to tell us.\u00a0 If the phrase is trite, then I need to get out more, because it was new to me then and I&#8217;ve never heard it since.\u00a0 It struck me as funny at the time, though I wondered what the original word was that &#8220;booties&#8221; replaced.\u00a0 But it didn&#8217;t mean anything to me on any level deeper than the surface.<\/p>\n<p>I decided not to go for my scheduled 15-mile run this morning.\u00a0 In the 12 or so hours since I made the decision not to do it, the following excuses have all spent some time in my brain:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>My blister still hurts me every time I run and could use the time to heal.<\/li>\n<li>I just ran 11 miles on Sunday; 15 miles two days later is too much.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m a few days behind on my training schedule and skipping this will help me get back on track.<\/li>\n<li>The bottle of wine (a Valpolicella) that I opened last night to celebrate seeing my baby&#8217;s heartbeat was a little too delicious.<\/li>\n<li>I could use the time to prepare for a meeting with my thesis adviser today.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But none of these is The Truth.\u00a0 They&#8217;re all a little bit true, but none is The Truth.\u00a0 The Truth is that I wanted the time to do a few things this morning, to not have to rush around from home to trail to home to school and back again like I did last week.<\/p>\n<p>Not nearly as noble-sounding as many of the excuses, and that&#8217;s why it&#8217;s so much fun to make them.<\/p>\n<p>But this morning, as soon as I admitted to myself the real reason, the one that I built this fortress of excuses to protect myself from, I felt so much better about the decision to skip the run.\u00a0 Liberated, even.\u00a0 Facing &#8220;you chose to do something else instead of run because it would make you happier&#8221; was much easier than you might expect.\u00a0 Rational, logical, Truthful.<\/p>\n<p>Very recently, I noticed something interesting about the stories I was telling myself during workouts, especially the long runs.\u00a0 On the days when my body wouldn&#8217;t carry me as fast as I had hoped, a million reasons flooded my mind to explain the slowness.\u00a0 The heat, my blister, my lack of water stops.\u00a0 But on the days when the miles just seemed to fly by, it was all me.\u00a0 No credit given to the nice weather or anything else but me.<\/p>\n<p>This <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Self-serving_bias\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">self-serving bias<\/a> is actually very common, perhaps universal.\u00a0 It&#8217;s thought that we have it in order to protect our self-esteem.\u00a0 But here&#8217;s the thing.\u00a0 When something we do isn&#8217;t good enough, not up to our personal standards, we experience pain.\u00a0 This pain serves a purpose, to drive us to work hard to make things the way we know they should be.\u00a0 Pain can and should be one of the most powerful motivating forces in our lives.<\/p>\n<p>But so many people choose not to use pain this way.\u00a0 They deal with pain by doing whatever it takes to make it go away as quickly as possible.\u00a0 In many cases this involves putting something into their bodies, like food or alcohol.\u00a0 For me, the excuses serve this purpose.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s very easy, especially in writing about my runs on this blog, to explain away my bad days with excuses.\u00a0 But you might have noticed that it stopped recently, when I wrote &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nomeatathlete.com\/thrive-sports-drink\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">No excuses<\/a>&#8221; in reference to my 20-miler last week.\u00a0 No more softeners.\u00a0 Taking responsibility; facing The Truth.\u00a0 And it feels great.<\/p>\n<p>The Truth, as they say, will set you free.\u00a0 I still like &#8220;excuses are like booties.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>What&#8217;s your excuse <em>du jour<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Excuses are like booties.\u00a0 Everybody&#8217;s got one, and they all stink.&#8221; This is what the teacher of a songwriting course I took in college used to tell us.\u00a0 If the phrase is trite, then I need to get out more, because it was new to me then and I&#8217;ve never heard it since.\u00a0 It struck [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4701","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-motivation","7":"entry"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Excuses in Marathon Training<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On the days when my body wouldn&#039;t carry me as fast as I had hoped, a million reasons flooded my mind to 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