The Coached and Loved Diaries
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The first journal I ever kept was my college boyfriend, who fortunately has not yet run out of space.
I had been receiving beautiful journals as gifts since I learned how to write. I used to have a shelf in my bedroom full of them, and when I went to college the contents of that shelf went straight into a box, not to be seen again until my college boyfriend and I finally bought a house with a basement and my parents invited me to kindly relieve them of all the childhood detritus they’d held onto for decades. Journals comprised a healthy percentage of the accumulation. They survived all these years, despite the fact that they are at least 85% blank, a whole archive of that unique
j’accuse
that the empty page hurls at the frustrated writer. I always
wanted
to journal, but journaling did not want me.
All the aunts and uncles, teachers, and trusted adult friends (i had a lot of these growing up) who’d given me journals as gifts thought that I, a born writer, lacked only for space in which to write, and the thought was lovely. But the habit was never one I’d succeeded at cultivating. It wasn’t for lack of things to say, and certainly not for a dearth of feelings to relate. I had many crushes on boys and gripes about school and certainly worries about whether I was generally going about my life in the right way. But somehow, every time I tried to write them down, I felt like I was pretending. I was putting on a show, even if only for myself; I was trying too hard to be cute and sassy and witty and self-assured, and the effort was too exhausting. Every time a pretty new journal arrived on my doorstep, I renewed my resolve to write every day, and I gave it up every single time.
What kind of a show did I think I needed to put on, exactly? I don’t really know, but whomever I was writing to (myself? posterity?), I don’t think I really trusted them with the truth. Sometimes I was blissfully happy and hopeful - when I was acting in plays and working on the newspaper and the yearbook - and sometimes I was deeply bitter and angry and scared that i would never be okay - getting left at the boathouse on the ergometer for crew practice. I don’t think I ever dared write those feelings down - maybe I wanted to spare myself ever remembering them in all their intensity, or maybe I just wanted to dull their edges as much as possible. I was in storytelling mode - I wanted to show myself overcoming. I was rarely able to just sit with things and let them be.
But when I studied abroad, I missed my college boyfriend and he missed me, and I wanted to tell him about my day like I had always done when we lived down the hall from one another. And so I wrote - just wrote, unfiltered, unvarnished, unedited (mostly) - I wrote on my Dell laptop in my little apartment in a Microsoft Word document, then I lugged the thing to the university campus to use the wifi and I copy-pasted my tomes into emails. When I ran my first marathon in November 2006 and got draped with my first "aluminum cape," as my roommate glowingly called it, you can bet I put every detail I could remember into my breathless e-mail to Tristan.
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The journals i brought with me to Italy that year are blank just like the others. But those word docs? I still have them. In their essence - their desire to just communicate with someone who loved me - they contain everything that I could never have expressed in “dear diary” form.
And so thank you, if you are reading, for being my interlocutors of 2019. Thank you for being the reason I will look back on this year and have something that will tell me where I was. Thank you for opening these e-mails, reading them, and being the people I want to talk to about what I am doing with Coach MK and Fitness Protection - this huge career shift and the uncertain future it portends. You are #coachedandloved, and you make me feel just as loved in return.
You are coached, you are loved, and you are winning at life.
Coach Sarah
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PPS: If you enjoy the content I am creating over here, PLEASE forward this email to your friends and encourage them to sign up! I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your support as I start this totally new, totally unexpected, career change!
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We have been TIRED up in here, which is why you have not heard from us on the Morning Mantra podcast recently!
We ALL need a Soft Reset, and Coach Sarah walks us through what that means to her.
But if you missed Coach MK's prelude to our trip to Atlanta for She Podcasts LIVE, make sure you hear her words and take them to heart. She sure did - she put on her best earrings, dried her hair, and
LET THEM SEE HER.
Finally,
our most recent episode of the Running Life podcast (also recorded in Atlanta in our wonderful editor's hotel room) gets into the details of the conference - who we met, what we learned, and what we're excited about. We talk running in the DARK of Atlanta mornings (hell0, 7:45 sunrise!) and our vision for the podcast going forward.
If listening to podcasts isn't your thing, don't worry - transcripts and notes live
on the blog!
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ONE LAST THING!
#coachedandloved
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Do you like hot chocolate mustaches and downloading things? ROS DOES!
The Maintain PDF is available for your downloading pleasure - check it out as you listen to the podcast!
Click
HERE for the EAT execution sheet.
Click
HERE for Coach Sarah's recipes for running success.
IF YOU ARE A RUNNER NOT CURRENTLY RUNNING for ANY reason,
please ask about joining Runner, Interrupted when it opens to the public next month! Stay tethered to the running community while you maintain that space in your day and that real estate on your calendar for when you come back. It sucks to be a Runner, Interrupted, but we're going to have fun ANYWAY! (Spoiler Alert, there will be MORE THINGS TO DOWNLOAD!)
If you are RETURNING to running after a long period of interruption, you might be interested in giving
our ReBuild program a try!
BE LIKE ROS and follow Coach Sarah EVERYWHERE!
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#WINNINGATLIFE of the week!
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Beth Hobson is #winningatlife
, even though she is not where she wants to be right now. Beth is a CPA living in Charleston, SC with her husband and her cats, and she had to stop running several weeks ago for health reasons and is now in post-surgery mode, which means a lot more being still and a lot less running than she was hoping for. This is the hardest work of all, yo. As soon as we announced the launch of Runner, Interrupted, Beth was first in line to jump into the community, share her struggles, and validate the struggles of others. Beth, we are SO GRATEFUL FOR YOU. Thank you for being here. This is only a chapter - this is NOT your whole story.
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And
Amy Rhyno is #winningatlife
too! Currently running with us in our (Re)Build program, Amy lives and works in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has two boys, 6 and 9, and through the winter she can be found at the hockey rink 4-5 days a week. Being a parent to ONE hockey player (let alone two) is a full-time job, and we are so, SO happy that Amy puts a little bit of time back into herself every day. It is not easy. HOORAY AMY and thank you for being with us!!!
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To be featured here as well as our
Facebook
and
Instagram
pages, use the tags #coachedandloved or #fitnessprotectionllc when you post photos on Instagram, telling the world what Fitness Protection means to you!
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