What goal have you been saving for a slower season of life?

Aloha Reader

If you lead something, whether it’s a team, a business, a ministry, or a family, you probably have a list of things you’ll get to once life slows down. Maybe it’s next summer, or after this busy quarter, or the year the kids are a little older. Ben Gall has a full-time job, three boys at three different schools, and a running coaching business, and he’s found that the slower seasons are when he gets the least done. He runs more during the school year than in the summer. When his days are packed, his run has a spot. When the calendar opens up, running turns into something he’ll get to later, and most days he doesn’t.

His new book, Running Reset, just came out, and it’s his second book with the Authentic imprint of Aloha Publishing. His first book, Cultivating Champions, was written for coaches, teachers, and athletes. This one is for everyday runners. Ben is a personal running coach. Through Infinity Running, the online coaching service he co-owns, he works one-on-one with adult runners who are fitting training around jobs and families. Before that he spent more than 20 years coaching college cross-country and track. He also went through most of his 30s barely running, between young kids and a job that had him at work by 5:30 most mornings. He came back in his 40s. At 42 he won the Famous Idaho Potato Marathon in Boise, the same race he’d won at 27.

The book is written for the same kind of runners he coaches. When Ben starts with someone new, the first thing they do together is lay out a normal week: which days are open, which are impossible, and where a longer run might fit. The training gets built from there.

One runner he coaches, a mom, tried running in the afternoons, but her kids took over that time, and by evening she had nothing left. The only time nobody needed her was 5 a.m., so that’s when she ran, on a treadmill in her garage.

“A good week is built around your actual life,” Ben writes, “not around some ideal version of it that you wish you were living.”

When a week goes wrong anyway, with a sick kid or a smoky morning, he shortens the run, moves it, or lets it go and picks back up the next day. He calls that a pivot, and he doesn’t count it against anyone.

The same advice works for anything you’ve been saving for a better season, including a book. Find the hour you can count on, even if it’s an early one, and start there.

Running Reset would make a good gift for the runner in your life. The timing works too, since a lot of people will be lacing up in January with a new goal, and this book gives them a plan that fits around everything else they’re doing.

​📘 Get your copy of Running Reset here​

Mahalo for reading and for being part of this community. If there's a book you've been saving for a slower season, we'd be glad to help you start the reset.

With aloha,
Heather Goetter, COO and Ghostwriter