Find Your Pace & Your Peace

I am going to blur the lines, between this blog and my running blog at runsisterrun.com. Is that allowed? Never mind, something that I wrote on my running blog has stayed with me for the last couple of weeks and is influencing my parenting, so I thought I would share it here with you all.

Here is the excerpt I need to share:

"There is always someone out there that you know. There is always someone running significantly faster than you are and also, someone slower. You have to run your own race for the day and the conditions. You have to trust your training, you have to have the mental resilience to keep on going even when you don't want to. I don't even know what kept me going. I don't remember any specific thoughts other than the usual mix of "you can get through this", "you can run to the line". It never crossed my mind to give up or stop and let me tell you, I was feeling really sick.

And in the end, I might not have reached my race goal, but it was just a race. Just a run. How lucky am I to be able to train for such events, to be able bodied and fit enough to run that far, to have the support of my husband so that I can disappear for hours on end just to run, to have an amazingly supportive family and group of friends who encourage me and share in each others' delights. Truly, I am blessed.

Oh, and I think that I am finally learning that it is not about the speed and your time, it is about that feeling of strength and resilience. It is the translation of the mental and physical resilience into other parts of your life. It is the peace that comes from running long distances."

I feel this is relevant to parenting because we all have to run our own race at our own pace. We all parent differently and our children are different and need different kinds of parenting. 

Some days we need resilience to get us over the line - to get those kids in bed before we lose the plot. Other days we are sailing through, amazed at how good and patient we feel. 

We can always see other parents who we think are doing better than us and others who we judge harshly. But most of all we are all really blessed. Blessed to have our children, to have the personal growth that we get from them, to experience the joy of parenting, to create a strong, safe family environment in which they can blossom. And it isn't about the speed, or the time, it is about the journey. About every moment, both beautiful and frustrating. And the overall peace that comes from travelling the long distance of time together.....