No Excuses??

Last week while I was running my mind started to drift back to the good old days of running with my sister back in Houston. As we would run side by side we would chat about anything and everything under the sun. It became very common for those conversations to turn into us over analyzing every little thing we could have possibly done up to that point that caused a run to be either a good one or a bad one. Did I eat enough? Did I drink enough water? Maybe doing Insanity and a run on the same day wasn’t such a good idea afterall??

Now I like to say that I don’t make excuses and I try not to. I even have a nice little saying, that sounds great on paper, that I like to tell myself and it is: ”I don’t make excuses. Whether I face a mental block, a physical block, or a little bit of both, on any given run I do the best that I can with what I have.” Is that to say that every time I head out I leave it all out there on the pavement? Absolutely not. In fact I am a very cautious runner so I would venture to say that I have probably never really, truly given it my all.  

I’ll be very honest here. I am comfortable with being comfortable. I push myself a little, but I don’t like to not push myself too much to where I am unsure if I will be able to finish. I struggle with this even in training runs, where honestly it doesn’t matter if I finish XX amount of miles or not. This is something I am really trying to work on and I plan to push myself a little further out of my comfort zone each time I go out for a run. I know it wont be easy, and honestly I know the hardest part is going to be being mentally okay with letting myself regress a bit so that I can come back even stronger in the long run.
 
Do you find yourself making excuses for a less than stellar run? How do you get past your mental blocks to push yourself out of your comfort zone?