My name is Becky Wade. I am a professional runner and author, and I live in Boulder, Colorado.

To me, resilience is having the patience, the self-confidence and the fortitude to weather difficult moments in order to get a little bit closer to your ultimate end goal. And for me, as a professional marathoner, that’s just to maximize my potential as a long distance runner. And resilience is so relevant to what I do because first of all, female marathoners aren’t at their best until their late 30s or early 40s. And so, if I were to get so down and defeated after every defeat, or every bad workout, that I would give up, I would never even get close to reaching my potential because I just wouldn’t be in the sport long enough.

And the way that I practice and grow my own resilience is really just day to day keeping my eyes on a long-term goal so that you know the little highs and the lows that come every workout, every day. They don’t ruffle me too much. And I just know that that’s all part of the process. And so by having a long term goal by trying to embody grittiness in every workout and every race and just knowing that even on the tough days I’m gaining something out of it. That’s really how I channel resilience in my day to day practice of being a runner.

Becky’s experience as a runner had me really thinking about the incredible similarities runners have to musicians. Although the athletes in college might not be hanging out with the classical music nerds too much, although I did have a track from Rice, athletes and musicians actually deal with resilience in really similar ways. We both have to execute a very specific task. And that task needs attention over a long period of time. In fact, over our entire life, and Becky offers helpful ways to work with us day to day. I really like when she said that resilience is having the patience, the self-confidence and the fortitude to weather difficult moments. As a music student, I definitely had bad days where my confidence was low, couldn’t execute specific passage, or simply thought that I had a bad performance. But it’s weathering these bad days that will allow us to inch closer to our goal in the long run, no pun intended.

Becky’s goal as a runner are just as much physical as we musicians goals are physical too. Both can be incredibly personal when we have a bad day because that means our bodies having a bad day. But I think Becky’s embodiment of grit in our everyday life can help anyone with their long-term goals.