Ever have one of those days?

I’m changing gears today. Normally I write about cutting edge, yet proven strategies and tips for growing your business and today I’m deviating from that. You see things in life and business are not always rosey and cheery. Things don’t always go well.

Happens to the best of us doesn’t it?

Sometimes it’s for a day, sometimes a week, sometimes a season. However long, it happens to us all. It’s inevitable.

I had a business client come to me recently telling me how his business fell apart and how his marriage collapsed at the same time. Brutal. He’s a good guy and an intelligent and hard working man. Sometimes bad things happen to good people.

So, let me ask, have you ever had one of those days where it’s excruciatingly painful to accomplish anything?

I had one of those this morning. Things don’t go as planned. In fact, they don’t go anywhere as near as planned?!

As you may know, I love doing endurance events – Ironmans, 100 mile bike rides, marathons, you know long distance stuff that only crazy people do. (I had a friend ask me why I just didn’t drive 26.2 miles instead of running it, said I would get there much faster! – he does have a point!!)

And when you do endurance events you have to train. And sometimes there are great days – like the 18 miler I did a couple weeks ago where the weather was perfect, body felt fresh and fast and there was plenty of deer on the trail – and sometimes there are crappy bad days.

That was today. I had a 20 miler planned. I have this wacky notion of doing an ultramarathon and need to get some longer miles in. Figured I would do only 2 more miles than my last long run of 18. Should be no problem. Had the run planned out, would be a nice trail run where there is usually plenty of wildlife to keep me entertained. Weather was supposed to be great – 65F, sunny and breezy. Figured it would be fun.

Instead, here’s how the day unfolded:

• horrible sleep last night and woke up tired (no problem, this has happened plenty of times before)
• body was sluggish
• legs were mush from the beginning and progressively got worse
• head was out of it – “this sucks stinks, why didn’t I just stay in bed”
• no deer on trail
• ran out of water & started getting dehydrated
• stomach didn’t like PB&J – without taking in fuel on long runs you are a gonner
• and to top it off I bonked with 3 miles to go! … I walked the last 3 miles repeating the thought “this really sucks, I’m done, I just want to get home”

Everything was out of whack. Ugh.

Oh, since I was feeling so bad, I thought I should push myself to overcome it and ran walked up this nasty hill. It was so steep that mountain goats wouldn’t climb it. So off I went. Thought that would snap me out of it – nope but it did make me hotter and used up lots of my water and only took me 45 minutes to go 1 mile!

… seriously, what was I thinking!

Ok. I got done my run/walk. Was miserable and hated it.

Sometimes you just have those days.

Here’s the point of this story. Because it happens to people all the time. I see it all around me. So what do you do when you have a bad day/month/year/season?

… you just keep moving your feet

I had to get done. The distance was not going to get shorter if I didn’t move. I could wine and complain and say how much I hated it and how I just wanted to get it over with (all of which I did). But the fact remained that I had to cover the distance and get it done.

So I just kept moving my feet.

You can apply strategies, best practices, cutting edge technologies, you can do a lot of things. And sometimes things just get hard. And when they do, just keep moving your feet.

If it happens a lot, then get some help. There may be something you are missing. If I experience consistent bad days (like today) I will get with my coach and work through it with him.

In the meantime, I will keep moving my feet.

And you, if you have bad days, whether it be in your marriage, your business, with your kids, or the relentless mind games that go on in your head, if you have bad days where you feel like throwing the towel in, just keep moving your feet.

Blessings,