I’m just now starting out on my third week of training for my second half marathon and all of the time I’m spending running has given me a LOT of time to think and let my thoughts run wild. (Pun intended). One thing I’ve learned about running, or really, training in particular, is that there are TONS of metaphors for daily life (especially my business) everywhere I look. It’s kind of funny actually…a lot of the lessons I’ve learned as a business owner have appeared again and again to me on my journey as a runner.

Yesterday I got to thinking about something people say to me all the time. When they hear I ran a marathon, they say “That’s AWESOME. How did you do that? I could never do that!” Which, I mean, makes me feel like I’m amazing and that I really accomplished something special (which, I did), but it reminds me that like every big accomplishment that you work really hard for, people think they couldn’t do it too because no one ever sees how hard you really worked to get there. From the outside, you always just look like you’re super talented, badass, hardcore, etc. When people think about running a marathon, they think “Wow, 26.2 miles. That’s REALLY far. I can barely run three!”. But what they forget is, no one started out being able to run 26.2 miles. Even Olympic athletes started from somewhere. Drake made a whole song about starting from the bottom! All of the amazing people that surround you? They weren’t born able to book 100 weddings a year, or (insert whatever accomplishment you want here). They worked HARD for those things. They struggled and fought for them.

The struggle is real. Like, really real.

And okay, let’s be honest. For some people, the struggle isn’t really as hard as it is for everyone else (and I wrote about that here), but for most of us, it is. And let me tell you something that is so true that it makes me tear up still to watch the video of myself crossing the finish line: the struggle is what makes it all worth it. I know there are some days where that sounds like the biggest load of crap you’ve ever heard in your life. It especially feels like that when you’re right in the hardest part of the struggle. I know, I’ve been there MANY times. But all of the training miles that I logged, all of the long ass runs in the freezing cold, in the rain, til my legs hurt so bad I could barely bend them anymore, the blisters, the windburn, and all of the other challenges made finishing 26.2 so much more worthwhile than it would have been if I just woke up and was able to do it. When my feet crossed the finish line that day, I wasn’t just finishing the marathon, I was finishing months of hard work and lots of sweat and tears. Another thing I realized was that although I HATED the struggle of training (does anyone like running in the freezing cold and then taking an ice bath??) without it, I wouldn’t have been able or prepared to run the marathon. So, as much as you hate the struggle and how real it is, it’s a necessary part of life. You might as well make peace with that now.

So, the moral of this story is: if you’re watching other people achieve crazy awesome things and feeling like you could never do that? Guess what? YOU CAN. You just have to be willing to put in the work and go through the struggle like everybody else. Secondary moral: When you DO get there, it’s important to remember every single mile you ran to get there and appreciate the struggle for preparing you to make it through the marathon. Without struggle, we wouldn’t get very far at all. It’s like the saying says, “No pain, no gain”.