What Motivates You?

One of the best things about the sport of running is that you can either be a participant or a spectator at a race.  I have done both and have a good time doing either one of them.  Of course, I love getting out there and running with all the others but there is something about standing on the side of the course and cheering for your friends and perfect strangers.  This past weekend I had the opportunity to be a spectator at the Mango Madness 5K here in town.  It is ran on the XC course.  I decided this year to not to run it because, well, trail running just isn't for me.

Now that summer is upon us, I decided to search the Internet for some tips on running in the summer.  My first summer of running was way back in 2011 and while I was still blogging I wrote this post on running in the heat.  Here are a few others that I found:

1. 20 Tips to Stay Cool on a Summer Run
2. SeasonalSafety Tips for Runners (this covers all four seasons)
3. Articles from Runner's World on running in the heat

I know I have written several times about motivation but that is one of the things that we all need and we need it often.  I pretty much did the walk/run thing alone for over a year and a half.  I really shouldn't say "alone" because I did have people that encouraged me and gave me lots of help.  The alone part is that I was alone during all of my runs.  My first run with someone else was on Christmas Eve of 2011.  The next time I ran with someone was on June 2, 2012.  It wasn't because I didn't want someone to run with me it was that I did want to hold someone else back if they ran faster than I did and that someone else was "everybody else".  I was a fast runner and had to take lots of walk breaks just to get through the miles I wanted to cover.  Little did I know that there was a someone that was faster than I but was willing to slow down to a pace that I could handle and help me along and encourage me.  Even though I ran alone sometimes, I ran with the group out on 350 for many Saturdays.

A few months ago, I discovered another source of motivation on Facebook.  There is a group called Truckin' Runners.  We aren't all truckers but we all are in the trucking industry.  When I first joined the group, there were like 128 of us.  As of this writing we are up to 190.  Most of the time we post our runs in the group but sometimes a newbie might ask a question.  It is a really great motivator because we know that if we aren't out there "gettin it done" and somebody post that they walked 2 miles in 38 minutes the we need to get off our rears and do something for ourselves.  I know when I see other people post their runs that I feel a little guilty if I haven't ran in a few days.


What motivates you?

That's going to do me for this week.  Thank you so much for stopping by and I hope you each have a great week and I'll see you here again next week.