These were originally thoughts from my run on August 11, 2019, but wanted to share them here for posterity’s sake.

If progress ever feels slow or miles ever feel mundane, just think back to where you were a year ago, two years ago, three years ago. We always underestimate what we can do in the long run with daily consistency.

For me, a year ago to the day, I had rushed back into running too soon after my first 50K, taking only a single day off even though my legs didn’t feel quite right. After trying to do a Friday workout, on Saturday morning, I got lost at SFRC and tried to run hard to catch back up to the main group and badly sprained my ankle to the point where my entire foot was purple, then had to call an Uber back to the store from Rodeo Beach. That led to some other foot problems, and I wasn’t able to run for a good 6-7 weeks. This year, I took 3 full days off and have only run easy the last few days, and my legs are super thankful.

Two years ago, I was EXTREMELY stressed trying to balance way too many things in life and also trying to run races and do hard workouts on almost no sleep, repeatedly banging my head up against the 1:25 half mark, hoping for a breakthrough and stressing out and hurting the people closest to me. On a day like today where I woke up late and had to run in the heat, I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the run like I did today, mostly just focusing on trying to hit this or that pace and getting frustrated when my body wouldn’t cooperate.

Three years ago, I was JUST starting to learn about proper training, nutrition, and speed workouts/tempo runs. I had just come off my third marathon in a PR of 3:25:41 in June at San Diego RnR, and I was just starting the training block that would lead to shaving 25 minutes off that and BQing for the first time at CIM. Hitting today’s easy paces would have been a hard effort!

I actually find myself using Facebook’s “Memories” pretty often, sometimes to reminisce about happier times, sometimes for nostalgia’s sake, but it’s also really cool to remind ourselves how much progress we can make in the long run!