my fear of the acronym D.N.F.

I struggled with consistently working out this week and finally got my butt in gear and did a 10 mile run this morning.   As I acended the hill on Coalton Trail I was riding myself pretty hard about why I elected for the past 3 mornings to stay in my warm and cozy bed rather than head off to masters swim or spin class.   Then I came to the realization I was really worried about being listed as a DNF in my race in 2 weeks.  For those that are not up to date on racing acronyms DNF stands for Did Not Finish, or in my mind Definitely Not (gonna happen) =Failure.  Okay so I have a tendency to over emblish things.  So why would I self sabotage my ability to finish by not getting my work outs in?  I have hundreds of self defeating reasons, but the bottom line is I am afraid of being able to really handle the length and mental challenge of the race and that I am not sure what I will do with myself once I finish it.   I had a similiar fear last year as I came in the home stretch with my marathon training and I will admit that post race I felt lost and not sure how to best redirect my "need to train energy".  I am not one of those people who loves to exercise.  If I am running, biking, or swimming I do it with a purpose in mind, rarely because I just felt like it.

Its also worth mentioning that I run with an ipod full of music from "Disney" peeps and Glee and that this alone is like mental therapy.  Its hard to be down listen to any of this stuff.  About 5 miles into my run I realized part of what I really do like is the challenge of the training and then racing was just to prove the point that all of that training was worth it. I would like to thank Miss Miley Cyrus and her song The Climb to remind me of this point.

And then I got a lil more inspiration from the Biebs to stop all that negative self talk.

Okay you can stop laughing your ass off at me now.    I have plenty of normally kick me in the ass running music like 3OH!3, Ke$ha, Lady Gaga and the like.

The net is I came out of the run refocused to just do my best and not worry so much about finishing, because what matters more is the doing and the trying in the effort to finish.  If the finish happens great, I will just start over again with something else new.

I closed out my run to one of my favorites - 

Tomorrow is a 56 mile ride of the bike course.