If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll see I embarked on an entirely new fitness endeavor that my friend is running. Somehow I have been caught with the currently trendy and present running bug. For practical reasons, I do need to run. I want to compete in Hyrox later this year and that fitness race alone is inclusive of an 8k run if you were to add up all the running in between the stations.
If you’re unaware, Hyrox is a fitness race that started in 2017. It has in recent years gained much popularity among the hybrid fitness community. It consists of 8 rounds, each starting with a 1k run and followed by a functional movement.
Hyrox Race Announcement
I’ll be competing on November 23rd, 2024 in Dallas, Texas alongside one of my friends. We’ve signed up for the women’s doubles division of the race, where you’re able to split the functional movements however you’d like.
As a nonrunner, training for Hyrox has undoubtedly led me to become a “runner”. However, let me start this off by saying I am no expert and I have no idea what I’m doing. (This is the whole truth.) To me at present running is simply moving one leg in front of the other at a fast (let’s be honest … slow) pace. At the time of writing this, I’ve been running for exactly 3 weeks and can barely run a mile without walking.
It sucks.
I don’t hate it but I don’t love it.
However, as the great Taylor Swift quotes in her song Mastermind,
“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”.
And this has been reflected in my very short running journey. I went into this with absolutely no plan and would honestly consider everything I’ve done so far to be a failure. This is not to say I can’t redeem myself from this! And I plan on doing just that.
My Relationship With Running
But before we can truly dive deep into the whole problem of me fixing my running, let’s backtrack to my relationship with the discipline itself. I am a former competitive swimmer, so running at the time was seen as a form of punishment by my coach. We ran to help improve our overall conditioning for swimming, and if I’m being honest I rarely did the entire run, whatever the distance, I would always walk or cut the run in half. Most times I just ran until I was out of my coach’s view and walked the rest of the way.
So, as you can see, we’re already approaching this with a negative mindset. So the first part of this whole running journey was for me to attempt to change my perspective on it. In truth, I’ve told myself that I can’t run, that I’m incapable of running continuously for longer than 5 minutes and that mindset has led to me not seeing improvements, giving myself multiple excuses, and allowing myself to stop. And this should not be the case, my self mantra is,
“You can do hard things”, yet running is the one hard thing that gets me.
The Plan Going Forward
To improve this running thing, I’ve sought the counsel of all my running friends and have developed a little plan that I think is going to work out just fine. At least we’ll see in a couple of weeks 😂. The common theme that everyone has echoed to me has been consistency. As a CrossFit girlie who has seen exactly what consistency can do, I’ve decided to keep at this whole running thing and just be consistent. (Let’s be honest, I have to run anyway for Hyrox 🥴). I’ve started a 10K plan and I plan on following that programming for the next 13 weeks leading up to Hyrox. My goal is be be consistent and stick to it because, “I can do hard things”, even if that hard thing is running.
This is not to say in the last 3 weeks of my running haven’t seen improvements. I have been able to successfully run a kilometer without stopping 😂 if you want to count that before this little journey, 400m was a struggle so I want to give credit where credit is due and celebrate my little wins.
In truth, all complaining aside, I’m excited to look back on this moment in time a few weeks from now and see just how far I’ve come. There is such beauty in completing a goal you once thought was unachievable for yourself, and I’m so happy I get to share this Thanks for reading this far! If you want to keep you with my running and Hyrox training in real time follow me on Instagram. I love connecting with you guys there!
Until next time! Keep crushing it 💪🏽🏃🏽♀️
Read my last blog post here 🤗
