Dear running

Runners on red dirt road
Photo taken an hour after today’s post was written.

 

Dear running,

If i remember this correctly, we met when i was 10 years old on the Thomasville Elementary School playground in 1969. Apparently i, like every other child on the playground, was too impatient to walk between playground apparatus so we ran.

But it was that one fateful morning when the Physical Education teacher took my class of 5th graders to the parking lot to time each child in the 50-yard dash that something changed.

Unbeknownst to me, i learned that day that out of the 30 other children in class, the teacher said i had the fastest time.

This was the day i learned about attitude.

Thank you.

 

•  •  •  •  •

This website is about our mental attitude. To easily leave this site to read today’s post on jeff’s physical health website, click here.

 

So What Did jeff noel Do With This Insight?

jeff noel Thought "What If" You Applied Walt Disney's Business Practices To Running

One of life’s greatest mysteries: common sense is rarely common practice. This was one of Walt Disney’s secret weapons against his competitors. Walt Disney instilled in his associates a relentless focus on the basics and the never-ending discipline to not get bored with business basics.

noel began running only 100 meters per day. It was months before he was running several miles a day. What enabled noel to manage his high cholesterol was finding creative ways to stay motivated when the inevitable boredom and desire to quit would come. And it always does.

Next Blog

jeff noel, Please Give Your Audience An Example Of How You Applied Disney Excellence To Midlife?

How Does One Stay At The Top Of Their Game For A Lifetime?

Dear Boomer friends, we all know the unfair surprising number of health related challenges midlife brings. High cholesterol struck jeff noel 12 years ago, and with a family history of heart disease, noel needed to refocus on excellent diet and exercise habits.

Diet and exercise gurus teach the “how to” diet, “how to” exercise – this is good. But health gurus, for whatever reason, neglect the critical success factor that noel preaches at Lane 8 – getting healthy is one thing, staying there is a lifetime event.

Next Blog

Out Of No Where

Checking Their 5k Results
Checking Their 5k Results

I caught up to him on Saturday morning, 14 minutes into it, at the two-mile mark. We still had 1.1 miles to go. He looked like a good runner, and probably in my age-group.

It would be about three more minutes before I made a calculated move. Up the hill. Not a big hill, but at the 2.5 mile mark, any hill seems big.

“When you ran up that hill, I knew there was no way I’d catch you”, he said.

Out of nowhere.

That’s where it came from.

After the race, we were just talking about running, getting in shape, and the reasons we do it and the common struggles to stay motivated.

He had lost 50 pounds. “Congratulations!”, I said.

Then.

Out of nowhere.

“After our son died, I gained a lot of weight. It was three years before I decided to lose the weight”, he said.

“What happened?”, I asked, hesitantly, but unafraid.

His son was in college, but home and riding in a friend’s car.

The friend crashed, and his son died tragically.

It happened near their home.

An Old Ironic Habit

“It is an old ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way”.Rollo May

I’m tempted to question myself. Why? Because many I talk with, think I’m crazy to believe that people will want to change if the right recipe comes along.

There is a secret recipe. Everyone knows it. But because we ignore it, it remains a secret.

The secret is, “work hard and find your purpose”.

Most people don’t want to do either. I certainly didn’t. Most of my life was, “Work hard, play hard”. That’s a catch phrase for, “Hurry up, we’re lost”.

Then I regained consciousness and started looking around.  There’s much work to be done.  The harvest is great, the workers are few.

Next Blog