"You are not allowed to worry."
The instructions from my coach were clear as bell:
You are not allowed to worry.
It reminded me of the edict she gave me back in March that I was not allowed to wear an iPod while running a road race.
This particular proclamation came when I emailed her Monday morning with drastic changes to my schedule. See, the Canisius softball team advanced to the NCAA tournament which means another road trip for me -- this time to Long Island and Hofstra University for weekend games. Luckily, Friday was scheduled as a day off from training anyway but Saturday was a 45-minute run and an hour bike ride.
The run I can do pretty much anywhere. The bike ride wouldn't be feasible so I asked if I could move that ride to today instead.
So my instructions were to move the bike ride and not worry.
And actually, not worrying has become much easier for me. It's a by-product of my training. Because one of the first things you realize as you start to learn a new skill (like swimming) or try to improve your fitness (like running a 5K) you quickly learn that things never go as planned. Some say there are no setbacks in training, only lessons. But whatever your semantics may be, things will not follow the plan. I have had days where I thought I couldn't swim the length of the pool, days when I thought I couldn't run another 10 seconds and days when I wondered if I even knew how to use the gears on my bike.
But I plodded through each workout. I heard the words of Women's Quest staff member Jacqueline Stanford echo through my brain: "Why would you want to stop now?"
And I kept on going. I trusted the process. I knew my coach would get me to where I needed to go. I knew that curve balls only meant changing my plan, not abandoning it.
I still get frantic from time to time. Frantic is how I vent. Let me be crazy for about 15 minutes and I'll settle in.
Perhaps I learned this most from swimming. You can't fight the water. You will lose every time. You have to learn to work with the water in order to move through it. I'm not the greatest at this yet (see the fact that I still create too much resistance with my head position) but I'm learning.
It's the same with anything else in life. The go-with-the-flow mentality is overused and can get a bad rap. It's not necessarily about completely surrendering yourself to the whims of the universe (after all, if you do absolutely nothing in the water you'll still probably drown, just more slowly). Instead it's about working with what exists in that moment and trusting that if you take care of the little things, the bigger things will fall into place.
