Two months ago this was me. Running after a truck that had no driver, through a wheat field for a mile or more. It’s kind of a long story as to why I chased a truck through a wheat field. And at the time it was SO NOT funny.
As I look back on that hot, sticky July afternoon and recall how surreal it was to watch that demon truck (because that’s what I call it now) bumping through the field, I am grateful for all the physical conditioning I’d been doing recently. I could not have foreseen sprinting that fast for that far when I was on my treadmill every day pounding out miles and doing interval sprints to help me prepare for a half marathon.
Someone recently talked about the struggle of the daily-grind-blah-blah-blah work. I could relate so well, and I am sure you can too. It is a struggle to get through the emails, the reports, the redundancy of tasks that show up every day, once a week, and twice a month. B.O.R.I.N.G. Right? And we start to wonder what all this is for. Doubt seeps in…doubt about our purpose, our ability, and our place.
The daily grind isn’t the flashy-pants, gold-medal win of a top-notch program roll-out or status-quo-shattering product launch. It’s not the adrenaline rush of putting out fires all the time. The every-day-slogging leaves us with the ‘why-bother-no-one-is-looking-anyway’ feeling.
What we forget is that it is the consistency of keeping at those daily tasks, the daily work-outs that keep our minds and bodies in a state of readiness for when the unexpected happens. Building the mental muscle to stick with the boring stuff is exactly what prepares us to be able to manage the stress of the inevitable fire-drill. Training the body over and over makes it ready for that final 60-second sprint at the end of a half-marathon…or for chasing down a truck through a wheat field.
I know there are other life – and work – lessons to be gleaned from that truck-chasing incident so don’t be surprised if I circle back to it in a future post. But for today, what was on my mind was to be grateful for the daily grind because it paid off when it was time to dig deep.
