TAHOE CITY, Calif. — Well I apologize for the lag in posts but admittedly it’s been a busy few weeks.  Tuesday was my last day at my old job before I start a new one Monday.  My intention is to keep the topics on this blog entirely separate from my day job, so I’ll be as brief as possible about this but I have to say I have already received seven welcome notes from my new teammates and I absolutely cannot wait to start on Monday.  (And I should also insert here the standard disclaimer: the opinions expressed on this blog are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of either my current or past employers).

I was actually very close to not writing this post today because I have intentionally made this into an extended detox weekend from any kind of work obligations or deadlines.  A blog post was simply another bit of added pressure, but I sat down this evening overlooking the twilight on Lake Tahoe feeling like I had to write.  So I am.

And this is as it should be.  Recently I’ve had an internal battle that I will call the “Happiness Battle.”  What is the Happiness Battle?  It’s the constant internal recitation of some form of “if I only had X, then I would really be happy.”  Sound familiar?  If so, you’re not alone.

Admittedly, I’ve played this game as long as I can remember.  “X” could be a job, any of a variety of material possessions, or even something perhaps more ostensibly meaningful like a personal relationship.  My knee injury has caused the most acute and most recent instance of it for me: “Everything’s great, if only that would heal and I could run 100 percent then everything would be perfect.”

But life doesn’t work that way.  If you’re seeking external validation for your happiness, you’re never going to find it. No matter how honorable the wished source of your happiness may be.

This is a lesson that it has taken me a long time to learn.  I’ve lived a blessed life so far but I’ve also happened to live in a number of places where “keeping up with the Joneses” is a way of life.  I wanted a better car, a better place to live, a better job, a better this or that.  Surely enough, however, once I upgraded in one of these areas, a new golden gizmo presented itself.

This is a vicious cycle that will eat you alive if you let it.  You’ll never be content, period. As a runner, this has meant for me preparing for the possibility that I might not be able to run like I hope to again.  I don’t expect this to happen, but I have to be prepared for that possibility.

How do I prepare for it?  I realize that my happiness (or inner peace, or contentment, or however you’d like to define it) has its source entirely within me.  It doesn’t come from running, even though that is something I enjoy doing.  It doesn’t come from my family, even though we are very close.  Instead of looking to others or to some assortment of inanimate objects to fill me with happiness, I take care of it instead.  And you know what the crazy thing is?  As soon as I decided on this, I had several immediate breakthroughs.  I landed the amazing new job.  I made some enormous leaps forward on my knee recovery and am now able to run up to 20 minutes.  A friend happened to be moving out of his apartment and the timing was perfect so I grabbed it.  Now my commute will be 20 minutes where it used to be more than 60.

Isn’t it amazing how all this works?  I could go on, there are other recent examples in my life to cite but I think I’ve made my point.  This is one of the hardest lessons to learn and some people learn it early; some never learn it.  I wish I would have learned it earlier.  But if you’re struggling with something right now that you feel is holding you back, let it go. Don’t let it control your happiness.  In fact, once you take control and decide to be happy no matter what happens, you’ll be amazed at the happiness-inciting breakthroughs that will suddenly come your way.

BONUS MATERIAL: I’ve been a mini road trip machine of late (scouting potential future racing locations!) and intended to do some travelogue-ing but in the meantime I have photos to share.  The first set below is from Eureka, Calif. (and the drive there and back), a town about 250 miles north of San Francisco on the Pacific Coast.  I had no idea what to expect there but my two cents on the place is that it has a very coastal Carolina feel but with a northern California hippie twist and visible mountains in the distance.  The second set is from today’s Tahoe excursion and includes a few of my Jeep in its “natural” habitat.  You might also notice that I’m a train nut…

Until next time!

Eureka, California:

Tahoe/Truckee, California:

Stock photos by flickrized and lilit.

It’s raining for what will hopefully be the last weekend before our glorious long summer dry season here in northern California.  I am ready for it to STOP.

That being said, the precipitation has precipitated an enormous amount of blog productivity on my part.

Actually, to simply say blog productivity would be a bit limiting to its overall scope so I’m going to call it The Project.

What is The Project?  Well, that’s for me to know and you to wonder.  At least in the short term .

But I have been planning some big changes to this site.  BIG ones.  The changes may even involve a URL switch, but if that’s the case you’ll be duly informed.

No massive undertaking can be successful without clearly stated goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely (SMART!), however, and those I have been hard at work on as well.  I won’t reveal them just yet – I ‘m going to save that for the re-launch.  But here are some hints on my seven mid-term goals (to be accomplished in 1-5 years, although all except two I am aiming to accomplish in two years or less).

Goal #1 is a fitness goal.  And not just any fitness goal, but a competitive fitness goal.

Goal #2 is a personal finance goal.

Goal #3 is an entrepreneurship goal.

Goal #4 is a charity/philanthropic goal.

Goal #5 is a language learning goal.

Goal #6 is a travel goal.

Goal #7 is a writing goal.

I’m dying to reveal exactly what they are but I really want to save them for the site re-launch, where I can marshal all my forces to make as big a splash as possible.  If you’re a smart person (and I know you are, because you’re reading this site), you might surmise that the theme of the new site might just happen to follow the themes of these goals.

I want to be honest here right from the beginning: I have always had a hard time sharing my personal goals with others.  Why?  Well, for the same reason 99 percent of the people out there either don’t make goals or never share them with others: I was afraid of failure.  I am still afraid of failure.  But I have two choices: I can 1) keep my goals to myself, maybe accomplish them, and maybe not, but otherwise live with the satisfaction of knowing that I successfully hid my success or lack thereof from everyone I know.  Or 2) I can put myself out there, and assume every drop of risk involved with possibly making a fool out of myself.  As Winston Churchill said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”  If I don’t start giving myself the opportunity to fail, I will never find the opportunity to succeed.

…But there are a couple of things I need to do first.  I need to find a kick-ass web designer who can take this site from lame to fame within a reasonable budget (if you have any suggestions or would like to offer your services, let me know!).  I also need to crank the little writing machine that lives in my brain into high gear to create lots of stellar content that will keep you, and lots of new readers, coming back to the site.  And I need to do more marketing research.  I’m making progress on all these fronts.

So please stay tuned, and keep checking in.  I sincerely appreciate you taking your valuable time to read what I have to say.  I hope not to let you down — there are big things coming.

Photo by Marco Bellucci.

Happy Easter!

With a little more than two weeks elapsed since my last post I’ve accumulated a somewhat sizable list of items I want to write about, so I’ll try to keep this as focused as possible.

Runners in the men's 1500 meters at the Stanford Invitational, March 26, 2010

But I must be honest.  It has been a tough few weeks.  I have to keep reminding myself, as I wrote a few weeks ago, to take my own advice.  Self improvement is a continuous process.  In fact, it really never ends.  And this is not a bad thing.  Remember when you were younger and you thought there would be a day when you had “arrived?”  Aging seems to me to gradually clarify the actual location of this destination: I do, in fact, believe the day of “arrival” still exists; but not in this life on Earth.

Lately I’ve been focusing on going back to my roots.  Admittedly, I’ve lost touch with them more than I would have liked.  This has happened both recently and over the past few years.

Since adolescence, I’ve done quite a bit and been involved in many things but there have been two defining themes in my life: running and music.  Sadly, I’ve been largely prevented by injury from doing one of these activities over the past year, and the other one I’ve simply neglected.

I’m trying to change that.  On March 26 I went to the Stanford Invitational, one of the biggest invitational meets of the spring college track and field season.  Dan Petty, one of my former athletes, surprised me by coming into town for the weekend to see the meet and visit San Francisco for the first time.

Spending the entire evening at the Stanford track was soul food for me.  There were a few Princeton runners there, and Dan’s former college teammate was competing as one of the top runners in the men’s 10,000 meters.  But other than cheering for those individuals I had no real reason to be there.  Being at a track meet simply felt like home for me.

I took lots of photos (album here: gotta love the pole vault series).  I spent quite a bit of time watching races with Steve Taylor, Dan’s former coach at the University of Richmond, and an overall great guy.  I chatted with Dan, and caught up on how things are going for him.  He’s now loving his job as the social media guru at the Denver Post, a career path that he’s told me is the end result of a conversation over dinner we had at an Applebee’s in Flemington, N.J. the year after he graduated from high school, where I encouraged him, based on my own personal experience, that writing for his college newspaper might be a great thing to do.

It’s funny how things like that happen.  In June of 1998, shortly after I graduated from high school myself, Ned Brazelton, my cross country coach, gave me a copy of Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie as a graduation gift.  I read the entire 192-page book in one beautiful, sunny summer afternoon, sitting next to Lake Huron at my then-girlfriend’s family’s cottage in Bay Port, Mich.  As most who have read it will attest, Morrie is a moving tale of a dying professor’s last life lessons for his former student.  It brought me to tears.

But perhaps the most significant reason I love this particular book is what “Braz” wrote inside:

June 20, 1998

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”

Phil, use all your potential to make your life worthwhile for yourself and others.  Learn the lessons of life well.

Ned Brazelton

At 18 years old, I read this and appreciated the sentiment.  But I had no frame of reference for really grasping its meaning.  Reading it at 30, it almost knocked me on off my feet.  I’m old enough now to see how Braz inspired me: to teach, to coach, to want to help others, to have a lifelong love of running.  And I’m old enough now to see that I may have had a similar effect on someone else.  Life comes full circle.

Am I learning the lessons of life well?  Well, some come easier than others, but I’m learning them.  The one I’m learning now is that roots matter.  They ground you.  Sometimes your roots come in the form of places.  Sometimes they are people – family and friends.  Sometimes they are activities, like running, that have always held a special meaning for you.  Often, these overlap.  But they always help you to remember who you are when you lose your way.

So even though I can’t run, I’m taking every opportunity to be around runners.  I’m committed to my physical therapy more than ever.  Every day at the gym, for my 20 minutes on the stationary bike, I’ve been reading all of the back issues of Runner’s World that have gathered dust in my apartment over the past few months.  I’m making plans.  I’m dreaming again.

And it all feels wonderful.

As for the music?  Well, that topic will take up an entire post or more, so I’ll have to save it for later.  But needless to say, I’ve been picking up my guitar a lot more frequently lately…

Sometimes the most important advice you can take is your very own.

Part of the reason I took such a long break from the blog before Sunday was that I just wasn’t “feeling it.”  Several other distractions had intervened in my life over the past few months, with my knee injury serving as a major catalyst for my lack of focus.  It seemed to bleed over into every part of my life.  I was becoming frustrated with things at work.  My relationships suffered and I didn’t see my friends as often or keep in touch with the ones who live far away.  I was short on the phone with my parents, who live 2,500 miles away and who I know value the time they get to spend on the phone with me.  I stopped watching what I was eating after making great progress on a healthy diet this summer (more on that in a future post).  Usually a consistently forward-looking person, I stopped looking to the future.  I was stuck in a rut.

All of this was not due to my knee injury per se, but rather the fact that the injury keeps me from running, and when I don’t run, problems like the ones listed above tend to creep into my life.  I’m discovering how amazing it is that one activity, or the lack thereof, can have such a significant, dramatic effect on my quality of life, but looking back over the past 18 years since I began running, I have always been happiest when I’m either running or around runners (coaching).

So, as I occasionally did in idle moments over the past couple months, I visited RB this weekend just to make sure it was still here (it is ).  I checked the site traffic and would note the occasional passerby, reconfirming (positively) that there was still interest.  And then I came across my post from December 12: When You Can’t Run, Write.

Of course!  So, I sat down this weekend and started writing.

And I’m glad I did. Like I mentioned in the December 12 post, writing is again giving me the opportunity to get thoughts out of my head, to get my ideas down, to dream and plan again.  In fact, in just the last 10 minutes I brainstormed a list of topics I’m looking forward to working on and writing about in the coming weeks, such as:

• Reducing the clutter in my life and living space
• Prioritizing my physical therapy and knee rehab
• Developing additional streams of income
• Aggressively paying down debt
• Making the most effective use of my time, both inside and outside of work
• Sticking to a low-fat, high-protein diet
• Eliminating caffeine from my life
• Seeking avenues in which to serve my community and country
• Increasing my opportunities to travel
• Restoring friendships and professional relationships that have been dormant in recent years
• Being the best friend/brother/son that I can be to those who mean the most to me
• Playing piano and guitar frequently again like I did in my early 20s

…And I’m only getting started.   So when you’re going through a tough time, or facing a difficult decision, sometimes the best thing you can do is look inside. You might find out you’re a lot wiser than you think.

Photo by R’eyes.

For many obvious reasons, Tiger Woods is all over the news right now.  What is unfortunate, I think, is that the salacious nature of the unfolding story is masking a broader lesson here that few people are bothering to consider.

Hero? Or human?

One of the dangers of putting all of your hopes and dreams into the hands of one person is that inevitably, at some point, that person is likely to let you down.  It may be a small letdown, as in a ‘you weren’t there for me when I needed you’ situation, or it may be a rather large one, as in Tiger’s case.  But none of us is perfect, which is a reality some have a hard time accepting.

Among many others that I will share in due time, I have two strong beliefs: 1) that man is fallen, and 2) that the world is not a perfect place, and no activist, actor, politician, or athlete will ever make it that way.  Tiger Woods was advertised as the savior of golf, and a saint of professional sports.  But that’s a lot of weight for a mere mortal to carry.

There’s nothing wrong with having heroes.  I certainly have mine, and they have inspired me to do positive things I would otherwise probably not have done.  But there’s a distinct difference between inspiration and worship.

Runners can fall victim to hero-worship, just like other athletes.  As a coach, I often told my athletes what Ned Brazelton, my high school cross country coach, often told me: “in this sport, you have to believe in yourself.”  The fact is that running is a solitary sport.  You can form some of the strongest friendships in your life with people with whom you regularly run, but at the end of the day, they will never run your race for you.  You have to want it for yourself.

In team sports, you win as a team, and you lose as a team.  Thus, no one can accept all the glory; neither can anyone shoulder all the blame.  The fact that running makes you responsible for your own letdowns is a scary thing.  But I also believe it’s one of the most empowering experiences in sports.

Running has a long history of heroes who have made the sport, and its adherents, proud:  Jesse Owens, standing up against the forces of fascism in the 1936 Berlin Olympics; Roger Bannister, becoming the first man to break the 4-minute mile; Steve Prefontaine, capturing the hearts of and inspiring an entire generation of Americans to put on their shoes and start running.

But none of these people were perfect.  It was Charles Barkley who, in a Nike commercial from the early 1990s, said: “I am not a role model.”  I remember seeing that as a high schooler, thinking it was an arrogant thing to say.  But there’s some wisdom in the remark.  Barkley was warning his audience: don’t put 100 percent of your faith in me, because I might just let you (and your kids) down.

Remember that as a runner, you can turn to others for inspiration, and some can even motivate you to do great things.  But at the end of the day, it all comes down to what you have in your heart.  Do you have the will to succeed?   Do you have confidence that you can tackle anything that comes your way?  Trust yourself, and you’ll be amazed by what you can do.