#Reverb12 Day 23: Letting Go

For the month of December, I'm working on doing the daily series of Reverb prompts to help me reflect on the prior year and hope/plan for the upcoming year. If you're interested, join in; I found this to be a very useful exercise when I did it two years ago.

#reverb12 Day 23: What will you let go of?

Name three excuses -- stories you tell yourself that are holding you back -- that you are going to let go of in 2013.

1.  That I've gotten as fast as I'm going to get based on age, heart, weight, etc.  If I were in my 50s, that may be true.  But I've spent most of the last decade getting gradually faster so there should still be plenty of room to improve, particularly in the next few years.  If I'd been a cross-country athlete in college, maybe, just maybe, this excuse would be valid.  But I wasn't.  When I was in my mid-20s, I ran, but slowly.  There's no reason I shouldn't be faster in my mid-40s than I was in my mid-20s.  And there's absolutely no reason that this next year, at age 37-38, I shouldn't be able to beat what I did at age 35 or so (most of my PRs were around that year). 

2.  That I've already made so much progress, it's not important to make more.  Maintaining is hard and is something that never ends (ideally).  Just because I'm in much better shape than I was in say 2006 does not mean that I can or should phone it in.  I need to keep working hard and there is improvement to be made.  I need to give it my all far more often than I do in terms of exercise (and to a lesser extent, diet). 

3.  That I can run off a lot of garbage put in my mouth.  If I want to be serious about having 2013 be my best running year ever, I need to be more careful about what I'm eating.  I am very good at meals, the problem is snacking -- particularly at work.  I need to make sure I have lots of fruit and other good stuff available, and I need to be prepared for some very late nights, just in case.