It’s 15, maybe 20 degrees this morning. There’s a nice light snow falling with a good amount more on the way. A thick layer of icy snow already covers the trails. I just finished a good training run. I had an eye-opening 50-mile race just a few months back where I used a much less aggressive form of training than I had in the past. I plan to use that same training method for a one-hundred mile race I hope to accomplish this fall. I\’m a little tired after the effort today, but I’m not exhausted. To be honest, I still feel a bit of anxiety that I didn\’t go hard enough today. I am worrying that maybe I’m less passionate about my goals for training.
You see, mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion had been the staples that let me know I put in a good run. I found a great amount of success for at least a decade and a half of training for Ultra distance races this way. It took many years for me to realize that I could be even more successful, and burn a hell of a lot less energy, if I could distinguish between an incredibly hard training day and an incredibly effective training day.
For years I believed that if I wasn’t physically and emotionally spent after every single run I questioned my commitment. A half-effort meant that I had lost all of my passion for whatever sport I was training for, whether it be Ironman events, Ultras, whatever. Truth be told, going all-out and allowing my emotions to just have at it and burn high during training felt amazing. I felt accomplished. Allowing my aggression, desire, and uncertainty off the leash as I crushed huge elevation on a run, or swam longer and harder at the lake filled my ego, even if it wasn’t best for me. I would come back from a run so fatigued that I could barely show up for my patients. I found myself wanting to take a nap rather than playing with my kids. I would actually be so tired that I would feel burnt out (exhaustion from training that leads you to well..not want to train). My training for was LITERALLY causing me to lose my desire to actually do the race.
There’s a big difference between being passionate about your training and allowing yourself to be emotional about it. When you\’re emotional, you allow your emotions to have the wheel. To make your decisions for you about what you will or will not do. This takes your life choices away from you. And although strong emotions can give you a lot of energy when they burn hot, the initial heat and energy of unharnessed emotions burn out relatively quickly.
Passion is a completely different animal. When you use your emotions to fuel your actions for a long time, keeping them in check while continuing to stoke the hot embers that fuel your actions and ambitions, that\’s your passion. Passion enables you to keep slowly and steadily striving, maintaining a consistent effort over a long period of time. To accomplish anything of importance in your life, you will need consistent effort over the long haul. Without passion, it\’s going to be a very long, cold road to get what you need done.
So what does passion require? The courage for us to get to know our emotions. Understand them. Listen to the information our emotions provide, even if it’s uncomfortable, so we can use them to fuel our passion. To kindle our motivation. To move us through just pure desire and into our passionate action so we can consistently show up again and again.
A simple emotional energetic outburst is nothing more than a shooting star across our mind’s sky. It\’s gorgeous and beautiful and fades quickly. Our passion is all of the light from the night sky consistently present and available to us. Even on a cloudy night, that blocks our ability to see the light of a singular star or the moon, our passion is able to light up the clouds from behind. When we are fatigued, or lack inspiration, and the big picture of what we would like to get done seems fuzzy, it is this passion that keeps us moving towards our goals. We are still able to harness the power of all of our emotions through passionate action. It is this kind of action that allows us to make real progress in all aspects of our life.
