As much as I love marathon training and racing this distance, I’ll be the first to admit that much of the time, it’s a lot of minutiae. Yes, it’s one sport — running — but I’ll concede that you can cut it a thousand different ways; I’m talking long runs, speed workouts, tempo runs, fartleks, LSD runs, trails, hill repeats, you get the idea. 

It’s the same activity, just done … differently, kinda.  

Even though we have such a huge variety of “types” of running at our fingertips when we’re in the thick of training, it’s easy to get bogged down in it, in the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other, hundreds of thousands of times, while we propel ourselves in a generally-speaking forward direction. 

That said, even when the tedium of training can be mind-numbing, I’m a firm believer that it confers so many other beneficial, transferable skills that the good stuff far outweighs the bad. Of course, I’m talking about the immeasurable value of consistency, showing up, learning how to listen to our bodies (which sometimes is on its own separate page from our minds), gritting our teeth and grinding when the time is right, and rinsing and repeating day after day, week after week. 

When I’m in the thick of it, I find it immensely helpful to remember that the process is the beauty and the beauty is the process. 

Keep the thing The Thing. 

Even when the minutiae swells deep, remembering to zoom out and acknowledge that this training cycle — this training run — is part of the larger narrative unwinding as I’m living it. 

It’s nothing but a blip of time in the long haul, and learning this — and accepting this — has been remarkably freeing. No longer do all my eggs go in one basket each week or in each training cycle. 

It’s all part of the longer trajectory. 

Marathon training also confers to me the rather convenient side benefit of quantifying (or qualifying) my life in several weeks- or months-long cycles, the end of which is marked by the final, culminating race (or races, plural, as it sometimes is). When a particular cycle concludes, once I complete the race — regardless of how my performance fared on the day — I have a better barometer by which I can measure whatever it is what I want to measure. 

What does this mean? Surely the obvious stuff — how many miles I ran in that cycle, my total elevation gain over the last couple months, how fast I ran on The Big Day — but also the less-obvious stuff, too — how much over the past X number of weeks or months did I show up when it all kinda sucked? How often did I give up when training got hard? How successful was I at controlling my attitude and my effort? When I was positive that it couldn’t be done, did I actually go and do it? I find all of this tremendously valuable and again, so deeply transferable to other aspects of my life. 

I purposely don’t talk much in this space about my non-running life, but the transferability of lessons learned while training to parenting, especially, roll deep. Ask any parent, whose child is any age under the sun, and they’ll all tell you how fast time seems to go, how frenetic the pace is once children reach a certain age (and certainly once they begin attending school). 

Like training, in parenting, it’s so, so easy to get bogged down (and some days, to feel altogether trapped) by the minutiae and the tedium, and here again, I have found that remembering that right now — regardless of the severity (and impressive scale!) of tantrum your child just threw, the untold number of diapers or spit-up-upon shirts or shorts you’ve changed, whatever the case may be — it’s all fleeting. 

It’s all blips in time. 

In parenting as in with training, taken together, all those little blips in totality can create something more profound and deeply awe-inspiring than we could have ever imagined. 

Being there for it — witnessing it, helping it along day after day, nurturing it to come into its own — is such an incredible gift and a privilege for which I am so deeply and humbly grateful. 

The process is the beauty. 

The beauty is the process.