It Goes To Eleven

For the past few weeks my stress levels were running around seven or eight. Stressful, but manageable. I was successfully juggling work, school (and school-related stuff), running, and my other two exercise hobbies as well as my social/love life. I was tired at the end of the day, but in command of my domain.

This week, I find out my stress level can go to eleven. Damn. All of a sudden, I was desperate to keep all of those balls in the air. If I let any of my exercise plans slip, stress doesn't get relieved and I become a lot more unpleasant to deal with, not to mention seriously unhappy. If I let school slip, I don't get the education that I crave. If I let work slip, well, school doesn't get paid for and neither does my car or apartment. You get the picture.

Tonight while I was running, I remembered how hard it was for me to get to the point where a 5K was something I didn't need to train for to do well in. I didn't have the mental endurance to push myself further. I limited myself with my physical, emotional, and mental pain. I spent several years at that level, not knowing how to break out of the glass ceiling I'd made for myself.

For me, it took a lot of courage to gain the level of self-trust needed to regularly go beyond three miles. Some days I still struggle to run five miles, but I consider that distance now my regular training distance. It's been only very recently that I've been able to consider ten miles an easily-obtainable long run.

This is a matter of perspective. A year ago, ten miles might as well have been one hundred. I was very demoralized that I might never reach my goal of running the marathon. How could I run twenty-six-point-two miles when I had such a hard time running three-point-one? Today, I feel my goal is within my grasp and I know that I have the training and the mental strength to reach out and grab it.

Just where am I going with this? Well, this thing that has caused so much stress in my life will not be the toughest thing I have to face in life. It was unexpected and possibly life-altering. To top it all off, there is absolutely nothing I can do to change it. Facing this thing head-on will be practice for when I have really difficult stressful events to deal with. Learning to relax, to breathe, to maintain inertia and forward motion, these are the skills I'm going to obtain from this difficult experience.

Because my mental toughness goes to eleven too.