Frustrated with Your Productivity or Training? How to Balance Work and Rest

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I sat down to write a blog a few weeks ago and couldn’t get it to together.

I wasn’t surprised because I had felt that way for the last couple of weeks. Have you ever had short or long periods in your life where you felt extremely unmotivated – like everything you tried to do was more difficult than it should be?

During these times I find myself pushing off tasks – things that I had been excited to work on. Even when I attempted to move towards the things on my to-do list that felt more exciting I just didn’t feel the creativity flowing. I wasn’t bringing my usual passion to the project.

This is so unlike how I normally feel and my inner critic started putting me down as I began to think of how unproductive I felt. Is what I’m doing making a difference?

I felt the irony as I walked in the woods one day. I saw that the plants, trees, and flowers were in a season of renewing.

Spring is a time of growth and revival. On the outside I was wanting to start my training for the summer 50K, begin new partnerships in my business, and come back to life from the dead of winter but another part of me still felt closed up in the flower bud.

This feeling and contradiction moved through my running and my business. Running in a t-shirt and shorts (finally!) was refreshing but at the same time I lacked the drive and motivation to train hard. I felt blocked from my potential.

I was trying to figure out how I had gotten here and why I was lacking energy. It was my husband who pointed out there were many factors at play. I had been through a stressful month in my business and personal health. My energy had been affected, and I was struggling with sleep like never before.

On Sunday afternoon I was getting my vegetable seeds planted to start them indoors before planting outside a couple months later and as I did, I realized something: there’s nothing wrong with me.

There’s nothing wrong with nature when it goes to sleep in the winter, wakes up in the spring, and plants grow and become green and flourish. They thrive for a season and then they return to sleep. It just happened to be that I was in a brief period of needing to rest.

When you plant a seed in the soil you don’t see anything and it appears to be at rest, and doing nothing (if you didn’t know anything about how plants grow). You would think that growth happens suddenly when a seed sprouts forth, but that’s just not true.

Just because you don’t see anything on the outside doesn’t mean nothing’s being done.

The reality is, there is complete destruction and the seed is literally breaking out of the shell so that it can bust through the soil and start to grow up towards the light.

It’s amazing what light does for plants and how quickly they begin to grow towards it once they get a sense of it’s energy.

I also realized that just like plants need a lot of nurturing and care throughout the season, so do we as humans. If we neglect the basics like water, sunlight, and food, plants don’t flourish and neither do we.

What happens if you care for them? They produce flowers, fruit and vegetables. No doubt, there will be a time of abundant harvest. After this, the plants will die or rest for the winter. Some will need planted again and others will pop back up next year but these are the cycles of their season and we are no different.

Despite spring popping up around me I realized I had just been through rapid fall harvest and dipped into winter for a moment.

Kind of like those days we get here in Pennsylvania in the spring where leaves start to pop, buds start to form, the ground thaws, the sunshine returns, and we start peeling off layers as we go outside to get some sun on our skin…then it hits. A cold blast of snow (just one more) before spring is here to stay.

You may be feeling this in your training, work, relationship, or other areas of your life. That cold blast of snow that forces you inward and drops your energy is no reason to self-sabotage or go into a spiral of negativity.