Pace Yourself and Why @_NicoleKenndy is a #Gutsy Girl

When working hard, take brief rest breaks every 90 to 120 minutes so your cells can recharge. Be kind to yourself, and be honest about how much you can take on at any given time.

Day 89 of 101 days of blogging.

Pace yourself….wait, what is that?

I ran my first half-marathon, the Nike Women’s Marathon in San Francisco in 1:48. (That was in 2009. Trust me, I probably couldn’t run a 2:00 now.) To prepare for that race, I practiced the art of pacing. Yes, it is an art – especially for personalities like mine; go, go, go, eat, workout, go, go, go, sleep, go, go, go.

I am confident that it was in those moments of practicing the pace that, to this day, continues to make it my half-marathon PR.

I remember this, and yet somehow I still can’t fully apply it to my life.

Maybe I should set a timer for every 90 to 120 minutes. When it beeps at me, a pop-up would come up stating, “Why have you still not learned the art of pacing in real life?”

Enough about pacing.

I’m ready to love on your gutsy stories.

Meet Nicole….

I’m a gutsy girl, because I started over.

During my undergraduate career in college, I walked around campus as an over achiever. I took six classes a semester, every semester and you could find me in dance clothes and no makeup almost every day. When I wasn’t in the dance studio, I was in the library doing school work and applying to graduate school for psychology.  Psychology was partly how I defined myself.

My interest took a turn my last semester when I took a business and professional speaking class within the communications department. Right after I graduated, I tried to find a job working in public relations/marketing. After almost two months of endless searching and getting nowhere, I did something I never thought I’d do. I applied for graduate school just a few weeks before the start of classes.

Mind you…I’m a very methodical, planned individual. I like having a plan. Stopping everything and applying for a graduate program in a subject I had very little experience with was scary.  But, yanno what? I’m gutsy.

I enrolled in a one year full-time graduate program in business and professional communication. It was the start of a difficult but exciting year. I felt like a rookie. Everyone around me had numerous internships, years of communication education and knew simple public relations terms. It took me double the amount of time to understand concepts, but that didn’t stop me from trying my hardest. Graduation crept up very quickly, and I was ready to take on the world!

I can now say that I am happily working full-time in a public relations position at a full-service branding agency.

I love what I do, and I love the changes I made in my education.

If I wasn’t a gutsy girl, I may be still looking for a job. I may still be lost in what I wanted to do.

I may be a totally different individual.

SKH Note: Nicole blogs at simply Nicole. She has an amazing story!
 
Tomorrow is day 90. Topic:

Vote Your Values

Love your guts,
SKH

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