London Marathon #12: 9 weeks to go

This week I had to be flexible and swap my Saturday and Sunday workouts so I could attend the Taylor Swift concert with my daughter, at the MCG on Friday night, along with 96,000 others (see below). The sacrifices we make - chuckle, chuckle! Sessions for the past week...

• Tuesday: Tempo run, Lake Titicaca. Lake Titicaca, situated in the Andes between Peru and Bolivia, is the highest lake in the world, 3,810m above sea level. It is one of twenty or so ancient lakes in the world, thought to be 3 million years old and the birthplace of the Incas. This run was 13km, done at a bit faster pace than I will be running the marathon.

• Wednesday: Walk, Cat Ba Peak, Vietnam. Walking at a brisk pace for 50 minutes. This helps with recovery for the next hard session.

• Thursday: Interval run, Iten, Kenya. This run involved 17 x 1:1 intervals. One-minute at a fast pace interspersed with one-minute of moderate pace. Distance covered, not including a 10-minute cool down, was 8km.

• Friday: Walk, Poenari Castle, Romania. Walking at a brisk pace for 50 minutes.

• Saturday: Easy run, Melbourne. This run is done at a very easy pace, 10km.

• Sunday: Long run, Atacama Desert, Chile. This is the driest place in the world, some parts of the Atacama haven't had rainfall in 500 years. I did this one as a progressive run, starting off easy and building to the pace I will be doing for the marathon for the last 60 minutes. Total of 20km.

• Monday: Walk, Lake Tahoe. Walking at a brisk pace for 50 minutes.

A comment from one of the iFit trainers sparked off this week's self-leadership learning: "We all slip and tumble, it's how we get back up that's important." It doesn't matter if we are Taylor Swift or the Dalai Lama everybody has their bad days, makes mistakes, fails, loses their way, behaves badly. The trainer made the observation that when babies are learning to walk, they fail hundreds of times, imagine if they gave up at the first fail! So, what is it that gets us back on our feet, dusting ourselves off and moving forward?

Vision and values: If we are clear on what we are aiming for and what our values are we already have a pathway and a compass. When we do have a "hiccup", it is so much easier to get back on track. The alternative is we lose faith in ourselves, head off on tangents and struggle to regain our equilibrium.

Resilience: The definition of resilience is the ability to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties. Some of the factors that bolster resilience include life experience (having been there before), having clear vision and values, a strong support network, a belief that you have the power to control what is within your control, physical fitness.

Persistence: Hand in hand with resilience goes persistence, continuing in a course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition. When you think about it, it's naïve to assume we are going to get everything right the first time. We increase our odds of success if we've done our research, if we have considered what might go wrong or what opposition we might get, and by believing in ourselves. But more importantly, we need to be prepared to learn from our mistakes, take on feedback, adjust our approach or our goal, and try again, and again, and again.

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts" - Winston Churchill