Adjusting expectations during COVID19

COVID-19 re-defined what normal is

It's day 852 of the COVID19 quarantine. People on Instagram have stopped posting photos of cute and crazy ideas they've come up with and replaced them with old holiday pictures of what normal used to be. Being a runner, I've started going through my Garmin log to look at the stats of all the races I can't do at the moment with the same affection.

We lost our sense of purpose

At the start of our quarantine in Ireland, I was mostly frustrated by the fact that the Paris marathon had been cancelled 4 weeks before the big day. All the training I had done was going to the bin and I didn't know what to do about it. My big goal had been taken away from me. With only 4 weeks to go before the marathon, my training was coming along nicely and I felt confident I could achieve a new PB. I had just run the Bohermeen half marathon with a new PB and all of the sudden, boom! There was nothing to train for, no Paris, no purpose. I didn't feel like running for a couple of weeks so I only went out for short runs to get some exercise, not cause I wanted to.

COVID-19 is not a marathon, it's an Ironman

In the old normal, we were used to being parents, athletes, professionals and what not. We managed cause had set schedules for work, commute, training and that brought order into our lives. During this pandemic we have been asked to be all of the above plus the roles of teachers, entertainers, coaches, cooks, dog walkers and cleaners. Am I missing anything? The problem is that we still try to do them all to the highest standard and we are missing the mark on them all. That causes anxiety and it's quite tiring to be honest.

Think about it this way. You're a decent marathon runner and you decide to enter an Ironman. Technical details aside, you wouldn't realistically expect to complete the marathon portion of the race in the same time as if you were just running that event, would you? Then, why do we expect to achieve the 100% at each one of the new roles COVID dumped on us without any warning? It's all about adjusting expectations!

The pandemic will come to pass. We've seen the first shoots of hope in a few countries around the globe. When it does, we'll get some of the old normal back and some of the new one too. At that point we can decide what of the roles we keep and which ones deserve the 100% of our effort and output. We can go back to running the 26.2 miles at that point.

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