It's time. It's time. We're doing it. Hi, everyone. How's everybody doing? How are we? I feel like everybody's anxious as I'm recording this. It's mid beginning of September and people are stressed out, which I get. I am too. I'm a very anxious, anxious little girl right now.

But I just had therapy and she gave me some really good stuff. And I feel pretty good, right? Anxiety, fear. I know what I'm afraid of. And I got the tools in my tool belt to fix it. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. I'm just offloading on to you. Hi, I'm Kelly Roberts. Welcome to the Run Selfie Repeat Podcast, where we talk about life with a side of running. This episode is all about confidence, comparison, and embracing your

unique style as an athlete. And this ladies gentlemen, these, thems, everybody, this is a tough one. And in all the best ways, challenging because you like challenges. And I want everybody to put their curiosity goggles on. I want you to put, put your seat belts on. And I want you to put a helmet on because I'm going to give you a lot of stuff. I'm going to throw a lot of stuff at you because I'm watching

Bikki were bust this blog series that I did. I'm you to on YouTube every single day a new episode comes out. And it is fascinating. It's really fascinating to watch me talk about myself as an athlete in 2016. At that point, I'd been running for a couple of years. And I'm really, really, really resisting accepting.

That I'm an athlete, that I'm a real runner, whatever that means. I know what that means. I know what I was going through because hello, I lived it. And I also, I work with so many athletes who were in very similar spots. So this, this episode is a lot of things.

And it's a universal experience that we go through again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again over and over and over again. And it's constantly evolving. And it's it's everywhere in training. And I want to start with confidence because if you could see my inbox as a running coach to a lot of people.

You would see, you would see how important confidence is in the grander scheme of things and not even like just confidence, but self efficacy, this idea of do you believe you will succeed.

How are you doing in your training and a lot of what we do at the badass lady gang in terms of our training team or even our running plans is really trying to help people step back from race day to zoom out from race day more often than not. We're training for something specific right.

You'll be your first 5k you're trying to become a runner you are training for a marathon you're training for a half iron man you're training for a sprint triathlon you're training for a half marathon right you add complications and specificity to it you're training for your first half marathon you're training to break three hours in the half marathon whatever right we start adding these very specific outcomes to it.

And things start to get hard right and not hard in the way that we all know that running is hard we all know that endurance activities are hard we all know that we are here because we like to do hard things the challenge is the draw the challenge is the appeal that is why we are here it is fun to invest it is fun to care it is fun to push ourselves to step over that line right.

That line that's drawn in the sand that line that we come up to it and say I don't know what happens when I go past that line I haven't been able to go past that line I don't know I don't know what I'm capable of I don't think I can go past that line whatever it is that you're telling yourself right the stories we tell ourselves the things we believe to be true about ourselves.

It's not fun to play it safe right sometimes it's not about playing it safe and it's actually just about enjoying the process and having fun right that's one experience that's an important piece of the puzzle just having fun finding joy being in community.

But then other times we like to push ourselves we like to to really really really see what happens when we do things a little bit differently a little bit more specific when we face fears and push ourselves to see what we're doing.

And I see this in a lot of people who either are doing something for the first time and also similar vein maybe they're training differently for the first time with me.

A lot of my athletes for the first time are coming to me especially my marathoners are coming to me after having done other training plans that maybe had them running way way way too much right the long run specifically this is such a thing.

This is such a triggering point for so many people and understandably so right I've been there I get it I know the fears I get where they're coming from you are trying to do everything you can.

Everything you can to make sure that your day goes well that you are able to finish the thing and feel good about the work that you've put in but like we were talking about in the beginning right it's not about race day it's not your training not about race day it's about the process.

It is about everything that happens from the first day training begins until race day until six weeks post-race day right because the end of one thing is the beginning of something else nothing.

Nothing is like this one experience and it's hard it's very hard to have that mindset when you're in it right because all you want to do is have a really great day.

You want to you want to cross the starting line you want to feel strong you want to feel like you are in a place where you can give yourself your absolute best and feel really good crossing the finish line.

I know I get it I get it but we have to start with where you are and oftentimes I have a lot of athletes who come to me and maybe what where they are is not where the training plan begins.

So I scale the training plan back what that means is they may not even get live we're going to use the marathon again because for the marathon for all of my marathoners I don't care if you're looking to do it in two hours and 30 minutes or if you're looking to do it in seven hours three hours is your longest long run.

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