January 7, 2011

How Can I Motivate You?

Last night was my company holiday party. (I have no idea why it was being held in January instead of December, and it was rather unfortunate, as there wasn’t much holiday spirit to it – more like a random happy hour.) But I gorged myself on desserts nonetheless, including accepting the offer of a to-go cup of cocoa and marshmallows on my way out the door. Nice touch! Surprisingly, I didn’t indulge that much on the alcohol front – just wasn’t that appealing to me for some reason. Hopefully I’m not losing the Absolut(ly) Fit mentality…

This morning, after a light breakfast at Starbucks, I settled in for what turned out to be a very productive Friday. Sometimes it’s tough to get a lot of work done on Fridays, because my team is spread out across the country, and it’s just not that easy to get as much done when you have to conference call each other for every quick little question. But today we actually managed to wrap up a deck for a meeting next Thursday – getting ahead of the game! – and still finish work by 4:30pm. Not bad at all.

This left time for me to participate in an interview at 4:30pm with a consulting firm who’s doing some work for Starwood. Apparently I am once again one of Starwood’s best customers, so they reached out to me to get my impressions of the brand. They also wanted to learn more about me and my personality, to better understand the demographic that likes this hotel and what they could improve. I love customer segmentation work, so I was more than happy to help, and it was neat to hear their questions and think about ways in which the hotel could improve. And don’t you worry – I made sure to really talk up how important a good hotel gym is to me in choosing where I stay! Hopefully the gym at my hotel will get even better 🙂

Speaking of which, it was then time in my day for a workout. I was super psyched – today would be the last day of the “base phase” of Rachel Cosgrove’s plan, which meant I could resume cardio next week! Or so I thought. Turned out I misread the plan – I can start adding in a metabolic circuit once a week next week (which is a form of cardio), but still no elliptical/treadmill/etc allowed until I’ve done eight weeks of strength training. No good – I have the Bahamas Marathon next weekend! Rachel will just have to deal with my overzealousness 🙂 Tomorrow – I’ll summarize how the first two weeks of this program have been and how my body has changed as a result. For now, I’ll note that I’m totally psyched and sticking with it!

But for the really exciting news of the day: I got invited by the Vermont City Marathon to be a seminar speaker at this year’s expo! It will be a 45-50 minute lecture (with some Q&A), and I have to let them know the title and a few sentence summary so that they can send it out in the runner’s packets… you know, to get them all excited about hearing me speak. How cool is that?! I am super psyched… but also a bit nervous. I need to figure out some cool stuff to say! Of course, the easy way out is just to create a Powerpoint with a slide for each of the 50 states and talk about the marathons I ran in each one, but as my mom pointed out, that could get pretty tedious.

So how about you help me out: if you could ask me any questions or hear me speak on any topic, what would you want to know? What’s most interesting to you and what would actually get you excited about listening to me the day before you run a marathon? Hopefully I can keep people’s interest, as I’m sure a lot of the attendees will also be stuck listening to me while running with my pace group 🙂

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10 thoughts on “How Can I Motivate You?”

  1. I think one of the toughest things about a marathon is staying motivated when you’re tired. You should talk about what’s gotten you through some of your challenging races. You also have a motivating song list, too. Congrats on being invited as a speaker! So awesome!

  2. what’s the best liquour for pre-, during, post- marathons? and different experiences with liquor after various races. Just an idea.

    i’d go for creativity, and uniqueness. I get tired of hearing the same drivel.

  3. Very cool re:Vermont city marathon speaker invite! I’m sure you’ll be great! Btw, I got the Alison S book & am excited to read it. It seemed like just what I was looking for re:nutrition &pregnancy. Thx for bringing it to my attn

  4. very cool! I think it would be interesting to hear the differences between Marathon #1 and #50 – your mindset, nerves, course, etc. You could also do a rundown (ha) of highlights or lessons learned over 50+ marathons – like your experiences in trying to find pre-race pasta meals, or travel delays, or crazy weather.

  5. that’s so awesome about VCM! This’ll be the first year that i don’t run it 🙁 Kind of bummed about that but last year was a rough year and I just wasn’t motivated to train for it so I think i’m going to stick to the fall marathons and spring half’s 🙂 Good luck I can’t wait to read about what you talk about!! 🙂

  6. Laura,

    Congrats on all of your accomplishments! I think one of the most challenging things for me as a runner is staying motivated to train in between runs and during the week. I also agree with Robin’s comment about staying motivated when you are tired. How and why do you continue to do what you do? And what’s next now that you have conquered all 50 states? I think it would be motivating to hear some of the reasons and ways that you have kept going. For me on a much smaller level, its about the friendships and the running community, which is great and filled with motivating people like yourself! Also, as a slower runner and not as accomplished, I would like to know how to stay motivated even when I am in last place! 🙂 Sorry so lengthy! Good luck with your speech! I unfortunately won’t be in VT this year because I am doing Berkshire Memorial Day marathon, but I’m sure many fellow ARE’ers will be there!

  7. Laura, maybe you could share some of your tips about pacing. I know this is a tricky area for me and I’m always interested when you touch on pacing issues in your blog entries.

  8. Congrats on the speaking invite, it’s very cool and quite the honor!

    I feel like runners and especially new runners can be really overloaded with lots of tips, tricks, and advice right before the race. If you can tell things anecdotally, they’ll probably stick more. It’d be great to hear about your experiences in races – meeting and running with people, pushing on when it got tough, the things you look forward to at the finish line, recovering between races and pulling doubles, etc.
    Have a great time, and good luck!!

  9. Cool! I’m signed up for VCM so hopefully I’ll see you there 🙂

    One question that would be cool to address may be what your toughest marathon was out of the 50 and how you got through it. Might be some interesting in there and may help people deal with adversity in their own marathons or even in life.

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