“Maybe the hardest part of life is just having the courage to try” -Rachel Hollis
I had mentioned to my boyfriend that sometime before I die I would like to run a half marathon, or at least try. I had wanted to try the 5k too, and that managed to work out for me, so I knew I wanted to take the next big leap and do a half marathon. I was thinking after college, once I was settled somewhere and working full time with no priorities outside of work besides training.
This sounded great, mostly because it was a few years in the future, but it still sounded nice.
Until my boyfriend texted me on a night in late September talking about Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, MN. He was thinking about doing the half because his sister was planning to do the full.
All I could think was “dang, that’s so many miles, and so many hours of running, yuck lol, I need a few years yet”.
On the last day in September, I was at his appartment and we were making dinner together. In the most casual way, he said something along the lines of “let’s do the half marathon in June”. HA!
HA!
HA!
I thought it was a hillarious idea, and that he was crazy for even suggesting it.
But then I asked “When do I have to decide this by?”
He replied with a sly “Tomorrow, registration opens tomorrow and it fills up immediately”
OMG.
.
.
.
Long story short, after thinking non-stop about this stupid race for the next 24 hours, we signed up to run the half marathon in Duluth. OMG. I still hate running, and now I’m somehow going to figure out how to run for damn near three hours without stopping?!!! Crazy. Absolutely not.
After running the 5k, I felt on top of the world. Exhausted and sore, but on top of the world.
Now that my reason for running was complete, what was I supposed to do next?
I took a little over a week off of running completely. My body was tired and, quite frankly, I still despised running and now didn’t feel compelled to do so on a regular basis, so I didn’t.
For the next two months I ran when I felt like it. Normally, that was one to three times a week at the distance of a mile. Even though it still wasn’t easy for me like it is for many people, it wasn’t grueling like the 5k, so I managed to work it into my workout routine each week.
I didn’t really push myself to do anything crazy, I just stayed comfortably in the 1-2 mile range and the 9-10 minute mile pace. I also should mention that by this point I had lost somewhere around 30 pounds since I began the whole running thing. I could feel that my body was slowly adjusting to my changed lifestyle and that I was managing to get back in shape slowly as well.
But what now? I realized I need to be working towards a goal in my fitness routine, otherwise I get lazy and don’t keep myself accountable. This is not a good thing!!
“Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try”- NA
This says it all folks.
As soon as they blew the cannon (yes, in New Ulm Minnesota at a 5k the New Ulm Battery actually blew a cannon to signal the start of the race), I had a flood of weird feelings. Made up of extreme nervousness and anxiety, I was also filled with fear and doubt, so much doubt. From the minute I woke up that morning, I looked for every excuse to NOT run the race. But, the cannon blew, and there we went, one foot in front of the other.
So in all of my “training runs” of a mile or so, I blared music the entire time. For those of you who know me, you most likely also know what I mean when I say I blared my music, it’s all the way up people, every single time. I hoped that by drowning out my stomping feet and loud huffs of breath with music that left my ears ringing that maybe, just maybe I could get through another run.
Well, something in the air that day, or the other hundreds of bluetooth headphones trying to connect, didn’t allow me to blast my music throughout the race. I couldn’t even have music playing softly…it cut in and out for the first half mile, so I clung to the 3 words at a time that came through my headphones. After that I managed to hear a phrase or two throughout what seemed like once a mile, or maybe twice if I was lucky. IT SUCKED! I was so dependant on being semi-distracted by music, and now I didn’t have ANY and it was my FARTHEST RUN EVER!!!! Again, you can’t make this up people!!
Anyways, the first mile was as normal as all of my other miles have been; painful for the first three minutes and then plateaued a bit to feel half decent. The next half mile was a little more painful than the first, and I was feeling more out of breath each step I took, the mental toughness kicked in at about mile marker 1.5, also the halfway or close enough to halfway point of the race. I’ve come halfway, now I just have to do that all once more!
Here’s where it got tough for me, for the next mile, I was surrounded by people who were interval running, so I continually saw them take breaks from their running pace and slow to a walk-which is what I wanted to be doing SO BADLY. I vividly remember hitting the 2.5 miles sign and thinking “that’s it?! I’m only at 2.5?!”
The remaining .6 of a mile were the hardest, hands down. At this point I’ve already ran a half mile further than I ever have before, and I still have all of that to go plus a little extra. My legs were feeling very sore, also like tree trunks, heavy and swollen. My mental toughness was nearly disipated and all I wanted to do was quit.
Then we turned a corner and I could see the finish line. It was quite a long ways away yet, but I could see it. I knew I would be so mad at myself if I quit with ~.4 miles left.
So I didn’t quit.
As we rounded the final curve of the race, I could see my mom and sister running to the sidewalk next to the course. I was instantly overcome with a rush of emotions. I felt so extremely proud. So, so extremely proud. I was physically and mentally exhausted, but so damn happy and proud. in that last tenth of a mile as my mom snapped pictures and awkwardly jumped/ran along the sidewalk with us, I couldn’t help but cry. Tears of joy streamed over my beet red, smiling cheekbones and into my dehydrated mouth. It was amazing and painful all at the same time.
I crossed the finish line. I did it. And holy crap, I was so damn happy I did.
I also felt like falling over and never getting up again lol, but I did it.
No inspiring or funny quote for this one folks. We’re just going to cut to the chase.
July 20th, 2019, the morning of what was supposed to be my first 5k.
I had a hard time sleeping the night before because I’m an anxious person and was beginning to fret about how I would complete 3.1 miles without stopping. I woke up a few times throughout the night panicking about what time it was and how many hours I had left before I felt like I HAD to run this race.
My alarm went off around 6:45am to ensure enough time to actually wake up and get ready to head to New Ulm where my boyfriend and I would be running the race.
I woke up to a text from my mom saying “Are you sure the race is still on? Do you hear it storming out there?”
I WAS THRILLED!! It was thundering, pouring, and lightening so much you guys, I swear this was my saving grace, it had to have been God’s way of telling me I wasn’t meant to be a runner.
I was convinced to still head to the Civic Center and be there just in case the weather cleared up. So, we went.
As we’re sitting in the parking lot in my car to avoid the rain and storm that was happening, I feverishly continued to check all of the sites and radio stations that were in charge of calling off the race. With a short 15 minutes until the projected start time, we decided to go inside the Civic Center and get checked-in just in case we would actually have to run this thing.
Well guess what?
I swear at 7:55, 5 minutes before the start time of the race, the clouds cleared and the storm was no where in sight. YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS UP.
I was overwhelmed with anger, fear, anxiety, nerves, and a little bit of excitement in the mix too. It was happening. I was going to run this race. We were going to run this race together.
This post is getting pretty long so snag the next one if you want to hear the details of those painful 3.1 miles 🙂
“I run, I’m slower than a herd of turtles stampeding through peanut butter…….but I run.”- unknown
Now that I no longer had modern treadmills at my convienience, and I would be living with my aunt for the summer months, it was either pay $60 a month for a gym membership or figure out how to start running outside.
I felt like for everyone else in the world, running was more enjoyable outside than on a treadmill. For me, that was not the case. Each time I attempted to run outside, I was tempted to stop running each time I approached a light pole or a crack in the road. It became a game of “Okay Josie, run to that red car and then you can take a break”, which wasn’t exactly a good way of pushing myself. For some reason, being on a treadmill and having to run at a steady pace forced me to push myself further than I seemed to be able to when running outside.
During my first week at my Aunt’s house, I drove multiple different laps around the neighborhood to identify some sort of path that wouldn’t require stopping every block for a busy intersection. I was super lucky to have an actual walking/running path right outside our front door. This lil’ path became my new running buddy, whether or not I wanted it to.
For the next month and a half I ran a consistent 3-6 miles a week, normally one mile per run with the occasional mile and a half if I was feeling better than normal after my 8am-5pm internship.
Leading up to the race in July, I never ran more than two miles at a time without stopping. I also turned 21 and did normal 21 year old things like going to music festivals and having fun so that paused the running schedule a bit at times. I endured many difficult runs that ranged from 1-1.75 miles where I continued to have feelings of hate towards running. I was my own biggest weakness, my mental strength would diminish more and more after each tenth of a mile. I often would feel like I had only .25 miles left of my mile run for the night, only to look down at my watch and see that I had only conquered .25 of a mile and had .75 LEFT TO GO!! It was honestly so hard for me, each day was hard. But, mustering up the strength to get out and go was ultimately the hardest part each day. It would have been a heck of a lot easier to just quit.
Two weeks before the Bavarian Blast 5k, I decided I should probably try running 2 miles without stopping before I was going to expect to finish this 3.2 miles in two weeks. It was a sunny Saturday morning, and I did it! Frankly, it was actually an exhilerating run for me, I was finally able to find a teeny tiny bit of joy on the run as I pushed through each tenth of a mile one at a time until hitting the solid 2.
I felt extremely accomplished afterwords! Until the thought that I still had to run a full mile on top of what I had just done in order to finish the race. YIKES. I now would take the next week off and just actively walked each evening with a one miler on the Tuesday night before the 5k race.
“Do one thing every day that scares you.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
One day.
One spontaneous decision sparked by a lofty idea or what I should maybe call a dream.
With the help of my encouraging boyfriend (who just so happened to be one of those humans blessed with a “runner body” and also just so happened to run track at the collegiate level…yea I know, annoying right?! ;)) and an internal push from a goal I had set for my next 10 years of life (aka my defining decade), I pulled the trigger and signed the two of us up for a 5k. YES, A 5K.
I’M THE GIRL WHO CAN BARELY RUN ONE MILE AT A TIME PEOPLE!! A 5K!!
I think I woke up everyday from the moment I signed up to the morning of the race thinking “I’M DOING WHAT?!”
Anyways, the 5k wasn’t until July, and it was mid-April, so I calmed my racing, terrified, screaming thoughts by reminding myself that I had over two months to conquer the remaining 2.3 miles that I would be running with my runner of a boyfriend who could do this in his sleep.
I got back on my routine of running one mile per day 2-3 times per week until school started to wind down and I knew that my access to quality treadmills would soon completely disappear.
During a sunny, spring week in May, I was feeling better than normal while on the treadmill and decided that today I would run 1.5 miles without stopping….and guess what?! I did it!! Just like that!! I set my mind to it, and I did it!!
Okay, that made it sound way easier than it was, it wasn’t easy at all. In fact, I think I looked down at the distance meter on the treadmill every ten seconds once I hit a mile, just hoping and praying that I could run for five more minutes (I ran about a ten minute mile pace). Somehow, I miserably managed to complete the mile and a half. I was now satisfied for the week and went back to my one mile a day routine with a little over a month to go before the race.
This was the week I was working for!! It was here!! I was satisfied enough with my attitude being “I’m in college and living life, I don’t care if I don’t look the way I want to”. I had lost some of the extra weight, but was still not in a healthy place.
For those who haven’t went on a spring break trip with a very minimal budget it goes something like this…soak up the sun, eat cheese quesadillas for breakfast with a side of goldfish, ramen noodles and pizza rolls for lunch, and hot dogs with potatoe chips for dinner all while doing nothing remotley close to exersize in combination with a large amount of alcohal consumption. Not exactly the best way to spend a week if you’re trying to better yourself.
In other words, this was my week of not only spring breaking, but also spring BREAKING. Don’t get me wrong, it was a week full of fun in the sun with great company, but definitely made things much more difficult for me following our return home again and back to reality. By the way, now it’s the month of April, a little over two months into this journey, and boy did I really want to throw in the towel…now what did I have to work for??
“A very little key will open a very heavy door.” – Charles Dickens
After a few weeks of running a handful of minutes at a time in intervals, I decided it was time to try and run a mile without stopping.
I quickly learned that was a mistake. I wasn’t ready for it. Mentally and physically, I wasn’t ready. As a result, my self-confidence plummeted like a boulder in the lake and I didn’t try again for another week or so.
But, try, try, again, right? Right. It took at least three different trial days until I was finally able to reach my personal milestone of running one single mile without taking a break to catch my breath. (Don’t kid yourself, as soon as the treadmill ticked one mile, I got off that sucker and panted like a horse that just finished running the Kentucky Derby).
So now this became my new standard. I set my mind to it and began to run 2-3 miles each week, no more than one mile at a time. This definitely was a double whammy. For me, that means it was so, so good for my self-confidence because even as an athlete, I had never done one mile before on a treadmill…however, I was also immediately shrunk back down after hearing other people say things like “That’s so easy Josie, just set your mind to it and it’ll be a breeze” or “I wish all I had to run was one mile a few times a week to lose some weight”. Yeah, that was a killer for me, and some days it was the reason my mental toughness wouldn’t carry me to the distance of a mile, but just a mere half mile.
It was hard. It was really hard.
Except, I had started the journey and that was the hardest part. Now, I was increasing a little at a time and I was beginning to see and feel changes in my body, mind, and spirit. I was starting to realize that a little does go a long way sometimes.
“If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.”- Tom Hanks
So now I’m 50ish lbs heavier than I’ve ever been, and I’m only 20 years old…a very unhealthy 20 year old for sure. But as many people will attest to, once you’re this far down a stray path it seems ten times more difficult to find your footing on the path you know you should be on.
My spring semester had just begun, which meant developing a routine that balanced classes, work, studying, and at the time for me, the dreaded E word…exercise. With a beach trip on the calendar with friends, I had some good motivation to atleast work towards losing some weight for my own self-confidence while being surrounded by 80 peers and wearing a swim suit. Fortunatly, my schedule had a minimum of an hour’s time each day that landed around 11 am when the gym wasn’t very busy, so this in and of itself boosted my confidence 100x when I knew oher people wouldn’t be watching my face turn the color of the Target bullseye while dripping like a leaky faucet just from walking at a speed of 3.5.
I was used to hearing many of my friends talk about their daily or at least bi weekly runs and it really drove me nuts that I couldn’t even run a mile without stopping, let alone three miles just as my warm up…are you kidding me?? Okay, that might seem a little crass, but really, I’m so happy for the people who have been blessed with what I like to call “runner bodies”, but I so badly wish I was one of those people too, my thunder thigh genetics just don’t seem to work quite that way. But, back to the point, I decided that the most efficient way to shed a handful of lbs before this spring break trip would be to try and start running, or jogging, or fast walking?
That was the beginning. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday or Saturday, I would try (sometimes with much more mental strength and success than others) to run for 1-3 minutes at a time without stopping and then walk 1-5 minutes in between. Most days I managed to run 3-4 cycles of this and then would walk to fill the remainder of my hour of time. On the in between days I had a Pilates class and would sometimes walk on an incline for 30 minutes in addition to that, depending, of course, on the motivation for the day and week.
I continued with this routine pretty religiously for about a month-one thing that made the time on the treadmill MUCH easier was this golden podcast I found thanks to a good friend, “Live Life Better with Scott Eastwood”, I would HIGHLY recommend for those of you who are like me and don’t do well with a bunch of advertisements or fluffy talk throughout a podcast.
I then started to realize that I should probably pay more attention to what I’m eating too, since everyone talks about the 80/20 rule. Sometimes for me this was the hardest part, I’m a lover of all things carbs and all things sugar…I mean I spent a month in Italy eating pasta nonstop, are you really that surprised? Seriously though, any chip, pretzel, popcorn kernel, starburst, m & m, ice cream, you name it, I want it in my belly. But, I wanted to be better, so I just started by limiting the “junk food” that I bought when getting groceries. I quickly learned how hard it is to stop eating things that you are used to eating on a regular basis, but also learned that if it isn’t in the kitchen, you can’t eat it!!
I dreaded walking into the gym everyday, but I began to feel so much better when I left. I knew I was working towards something that would better myself and I really wanted to just BE BETTER. Each day got easier, each week got easier, and eventually I got the nerve to push myself just a little bit more, because, why not? 🙂
The end of my January term in Italy! The beginning of my Junior year spring semester of college!
A little intro about who I am, why I’m doing this, and why you might have been in these shoes before.
**First Blog Post Ever, Feb 2020**
So basically it goes like this, my name is Josie Schieffert and I’ve been 21 for about 8 months. Like most 21 year olds, I am trying to figure out the rest of my life while simultaneously working to save money for apartment rent and cramming in as many concerts, trips, and nights out as humanly possible. BUT, I ALSO want to look good and feel good, amirite?
**Insert background info for those who care to read it**
In high school I was a 3 sport athlete who could run on 5 hours of sleep and was more active than I could even fathom now lol…some of you might already understand the hurdle that comes next. I went to college and quickly realized that consuming a plate full of meat and potatoes with a side of something that was maybe green while enjoying the freedom to take afternoon naps followed by wine nights with the girls doesn’t add up quite the way I wish it did. Add on top of that 6 months spent abroad in Australia where I lived what I might consider my best life, and where nightly “jugs” of beer at the tennis club were just the thing to do, and Tuesday night snack was donuts at 9 p.m., all of a sudden I didn’t even recognize myself or the habits I had built unintentionally. I was on top of the world, and quite frankly the culture in Aussie supported that. I was confident and happy!
Fast forward to returning to the United States and the second half of my junior year of college where reality quickly smacked me in the face like a Mac truck. I denied it for the first month of being home because, well, now I was back home and that consisted of meeting up for dinner with all the loved ones I hadn’t seen in 6 months!! How could I shape up with a schedule like that?!
And then the next thing was a j-term (or the month of January) spent in Italy where the table wasn’t set without a heaping bowl of pasta AND bread AND wine! You can’t go live out the Eat in Eat, Pray, Love without consuming pasta for 90% of your meals, that would just be a plain sin.
Moral of the story, and something I’m not proud of, over the course of 3 years (2.5 in the U.S. at college, and .5 abroad in Aussie) I went from 175lbs to 225lbs…PPL, that is 50 pounds!! And let me tell you, it WAS NOT 50 lbs of muscle lol. To be honest, I had no idea how I got there, I didn’t feel like it actually happened.
Soooo anyways,
Here I am,
Sharing with you my ragged, raw, but relentless journey.
In the posts to follow, I will give you a briefing on what February 2019-July 2019 was like for me and then dive in on the journey that I never imagined I would be embarking on, and when I say NEVER, I truly mean that. I never thought I would be training for a half marathon, but more to come on that later.
Welcome, and thanks for stopping by, I’m glad you’re here.
Mom and I before I headed to Australia for the semester! Halfway through the semester!Skydiving in Aussie, also the first real slap in the face about my weight. I had to pay an extra fee because I was in the “over average weight” category by this time. And here’s me at my heaviest I’ve ever been, but somehow so happy.
Josie's Journey 