"I knew I was too reactive but didn't know how to stop."

Christine is a marathoner and a mom. Her career is stressful almost all the time. She has a boss she struggles with, and family members on the other side of political and philosophical arguments she keeps getting pulled into.

She was well aware intellectually that she needed to work on better regulating her emotions. She just didn't have a clear system to do it.

What she really wanted was a marathon plan for her moods.

So she started ten minutes a day of cognitive conditioning last spring.

She rehearsed a different response every morning until it started showing up on its own. Because your brain responds to consistent training the same way your legs do.

Begin With Ten is that training. Ten minutes a day, built like a training plan.

"I love practicing cognitive conditioning every day,'" Christine says now. "I'm seeing the results in real life and I am less reactive."

You train your body every day with miles, reps, and sets. Here's how you do the same for your brain.

train your brain like an athlete

planted practice

Each week, I'd like to challenge you to one small action that I'm calling your Planted Practice.

You don't change the way you think by reading something cool in a newsletter. You change with small, daily work, just like training your body.

Each Planted Practice is deceptively simple, but might just be more powerful than you think.

This week's challenge: "yes, you can"

The simple mantra, "yes, you can," is incredibly powerful. We often don’t give ourselves enough credit for the work we’ve done to get here, and we usually have more to give than our minds would believe.

Simply repeating “yes, you can” to yourself when running gets hard can be enough to quiet the doubting thoughts and amplify the encouragement.

To make it even more effective, add your name. When I say, “yes you can, Claire,” my brain hears this as an outside voice instead of an inner monologue. We are often more likely to believe others when we are doubting ourselves.

*share how it went on social and tag me!

#plantedpractice

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podcast

Matt Fitzgerald is too sick to run.

So, naturally, he trained for an ultra marathon.

Matt Fitzgerald, runner, coach, author, and friend of the podcast, has been suffering from devastating symptoms of long COVID.

Running makes everything worse.

He waited years to get healthy enough to run again and when that didn’t happen, he ran in spite of it.

His new book, Dying to Run, tells of his wildly unrealistic mission to train for a 100k race, even if it killed him.

You’ll learn:

• How long COVID took away one of the most important things in his life,
• How he coped with the dramatic change in his life and identity, and
• Why he was determined to get closure on racing, despite the risks.

listen here

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inspo

"If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started."

—Cicero

Have a great run today, Coach Claire

P.S. If you missed it, grab the Readiness Reset, a FREE seven minute audio training. Use it before hard workouts, long runs, and race day to stay calm and focused.

Thank you for being a part of the Planted Runner community!

My mission is to help runners just like you reach goals they never dreamed possible through science-backed training and plant-based nutrition.

Since 2016, I've helped thousands of every day runners become fitter, faster, and stronger with truly customized training and coaching.

I also love to share what I have learned from my own journey starting as a non-runner to a 2:58 marathoner at age 42, as well what I have learned coaching runners, completely FREE. I do that every week in this newsletter and on the Planted Runner Podcast.

I'm so glad you're here and my inbox is always open. Feel free to reply with questions or feedback!

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