The Power of a Plan

Before the marathon start

I remember training for my first marathon - it was 2003, I was living in Scotland. Though I had been a runner most of my life I had never run anything nearly as long as a marathon. A friend suggested that we run the Rome marathon. I figured, why not - when in Rome…? (Sorry, I couldn’t pass it up.)

So, we found a marathon training plan and began to follow it.

I was a Californian, living in Scotland. My idea of running had blue skies and beaches as a central theme. Though in St. Andrews, Scotland, I did have the beaches - the Chariots of Fire beach was only steps away from the flat where I lived - the blue skies part was a bit of a challenge.

There were a few things I realized very quickly.

If I was going to train for a marathon, I couldn’t wait for a sunny day. Not only that - I couldn’t even wait for a non-rainy day. I would have to run, rain or shine.

The other thing I realized was the power of the plan.

Without a plan, left to my own devices, wondering should I go for a run or not - well, that might have gone either way. How far should I run? Maybe I am tired today… It would have been so easy to let my energy get expended in the back and forth and the wondering and the considering.

But, with the plan, I simply looked at the spreadsheet and did what it said for that day. No questions. No negotiating. Just blind obedience.

It was disturbing, this. How much of a ‘fundamentalist’ I realized I was, at the heart of it - at least where training for a marathon was concerned.

Fast forward to last weekend. A project I was working on seemed to hit a wall. It felt discouraging, deflating. Like the air had gone out of my balloon. I couldn’t find a way forward.

Then, in the midst of the feeling stuck, the feeling like maybe I was banging my head up against a wall, there it was - like when, in a movie, a blurry scene begins to come into view. As though looking at a reflection in a choppy lake that suddenly becomes glassy - you can see clearly what only moments before was muddy.

An idea. A plan. A vision. A way forward.

Not only was the air back in the balloon but it was soaring.

Yes! I thought. This will work. This is a great plan! This is a way forward. In the midst of no way, way had opened up. Nothing had changed and yet everything had changed.

What is it about having a plan that is so grounding, so centering, so motivating? What is it about a plan that brings life back into that which had gone limp? What is it about a plan that keeps us going forward, even in the midst of a dreich Scottish day?

Is it that it offers us a sense of the known? A sense of the possible? A sense of control? A sense of purpose?

Last weekend nothing had actually changed about the external circumstances - nothing had changed about the wall I felt like I was butting up against. Nothing had changed about the project that felt stalled. It was just that there, in the tunnel, a bit of light began to creep in, and that light was offering a way forward.

The thing with training for that first marathon was, there was no way, the day I began to train, that I could have run a marathon. No way. But, with the plan, and with a simple dedication to following its lead, step by step, months later I found myself running along cobblestone streets, right past the Vatican, the Colosseum - a view I never could have even imagined only months before.

This is the power of the plan.

It isn’t a shortcut for doing the work - you still have to run the miles, do the work - but that sense of the plan, having a plan - that connects you with your own agency, your own sense of possibility. The results are not necessarily instant. Sometimes the work is slow.

But one day, before you realize it, you look up to the view around you and you see it - the power of the plan, in the view you never could have imagined.