Floris Gierman walks through a brutal month: a family member's cancer, a friend's suicide attempts, a divorce, his kids sick, his own ear infection and frostbite scare. He kept running 30 miles a week anyway, using small wins and gratitude to stay upright when everything broke at once.
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Hey guys, the last 4 weeks has been quite adventurous and stressful as well, with several highs and lows, and some of you might actually relate to this as well. In today's video, I'm going to talk through some of the things that have been happening in my personal life, how this is affecting my running, and how I'm actually dealing with it. And some of you might find this helpful for your own situation as well. Currently it's winter and I haven't signed up for any races, but I'm trying to run 4 or 5 times a week, let's say 30 miles, that's about 48 kilometers. So not really training for any races, but definitely have some fun adventure runs on my horizon. Stress comes in many different forms and shapes, and the last few weeks and months has definitely been an accumulation of stress for us in many different ways. For example, a close family member on my wife's side is currently dealing with cancer. One of my good friends that I've known for 10 years, he actually got quite depressed and tried to commit suicide twice. I didn't know about this until he recently contacted me after seeing one of my videos and he wanted some help with a Wim Hof breathing exercise. So we've been doing breathing exercises together. We've had many long conversations since and he's on a road to recovery right now. Another close friend is going through a complicated divorce. We're really trying to be there to listen and to support And all of these different things obviously become a priority in our life right now. However, they also add different layers of stress to our life. All of a sudden you might not necessarily sleep so well, we might not necessarily eat that well, don't always get enough time to work out. They often say when it rains it pours, and it is so easy to get into a negative mindset to truly focus on all of the things that go wrong in your life. However, we should actually be doing the complete opposite. My dad has been reminding me lately that life goes through different cycles. It goes up and it goes down. It goes up and it goes down. And that's life. There's no perfect life. It's just gonna be as good as we make it. Just like with a marathon, like, you can have a plan A, but a race usually doesn't go according to plan. And that's the same with life. Like, we can have a perfect plan, but we're gonna have to adjust. And instead of focusing all of this energy on the negative, let's actually focus on the small wins. Let's look at the small things that do go well in my life. And my wife has been reminding me of this every day as well. Like, let's actually count our blessings. Let's look at all the things we're grateful for. There's so much good in our life right now, and that's what I've been trying to do as well lately. I've been trying to celebrate the small wins. My daughters are 2 and 5. And as much as you try to keep them healthy, they are going to kindergarten and daycare and everyone at school is sick in the middle of the winter. And so they ended up getting a cold and eventually a flu as well. Overall, I'm very healthy. When your 2-year-old cries and is sick and is coughing and is sneezing full on in your face once you pick her up, there's no way that you can avoid all of these bacteria. So add to that like the added stress, less sleep, less consistent nutrition. All of these different things combined, I ended up getting a cold as well, which ended up turning into an ear infection. So I had to go to the urgent care on a Sunday when my ear hurt a lot, and he ended up getting me antibiotics. And from there on, the ear infection went away after about a week's time. But definitely when it rains, it pours, and we can all focus on all of the negative and all of these different things stacking up. Or we can actually look at the things that we do have in our lives and all of the things that do end up going well. At the end of the day, if I had planned 5 runs for the week but my family is all sick, of course I'm going to be there for my family. Growth doesn't always happen consistently. Learning to be patient is such an important part of marathon training as well. So learn to celebrate the small wins. Focus on that 20 or 30-minute run that you are able to get in. And not on the runs that you actually missed. There's actually one more crazy thing that happened. It has to do with frostbite and snowboarding that actually happened to me. So I'm gonna have to share that one as well. This was a few weeks ago. One of my good friends and business partners, Scott Bailey, he asked me to come on a little ride with him to drive all the way from Huntington Beach to Powder Mountain in Utah. It's about a 14-hour drive and we had a few different things that we had to bring up there. We're opening an office over there for our company Path Projects. We left very early in the morning, drove for 14 hours close to where our location, final destination, was going to be. And there was so much snow, it was all covered the road. We had a four-wheel drive, and still with snow tires, we ended up pretty much getting stuck in the snow. So much further? Does it get much worse? Eventually we were able to backtrack and get out, but that was a bit of a wild beginning of the trip. But the good thing is, for the next few days we had amazing snowboard conditions. So I ended up wanting to get a few snowboard follow shots with my GoPro. So I brought the GoPro and I brought the GoPro stick. The only issue is I forgot to bring the little case that goes around this so you can attach the GoPro to the GoPro stick. So I ended up actually taking my glove off and filming several amazing video clips throughout the snow. There was a lot of powder there. The only thing is it was It was very, very cold. So I would get to the bottom, my hands would be quite cold. So in the ski lift up, I would just put it under my armpit so it had some time to warm up and then we would do another run. After a while though, my hands started feeling so cold that I kind of stopped filming and I just put my glove back on. That night, I didn't have feeling in my fingers and it started scaring me quite a bit. My fingertips were starting to feel hard. I ended up Googling frostbite. And I saw all these horrific photos of people with black fingers and gray fingers and all of this stuff. So it kind of freaked me out, to be honest. Instead of going to a doctor or anything, I decided let's just warm it up, not make it too hot, but just warm it up 15 to 30 minutes. That could help with the decrystallization. And so I ended up doing that. The next morning, my fingers still felt pretty numb and like they were white at the top. So I ended up snowboarding the entire day with my glove on, didn't take it out to film anymore. Well, fast forward 2.5 weeks, I actually ended up going to the doctor 2 days ago because I started getting blisters under my fingertips. I had this weird fluid pocket that started forming in my hand, and so I wanted to make sure that I didn't have permanent damage. And so I ended up going to see a doctor who actually told me that over time the feeling should start coming back. But this was definitely another one of those in line with added stress from the family already being sick. Don't start counting all of the things that go wrong, but instead start counting the things that do go right. Start counting the things that you are grateful for in your life. Train to be patient by accepting the things that are out of your control. So if your training doesn't always go according to plan, it's okay. Just be kind to yourself. Be nice, and eventually, you know that things will fall back into place again. All the things we go through help us grow, although we often don't see it in the moment. I would love to hear from you. How do you overcome some of the challenges that you're experiencing in your life? Please let me know in the comments. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you again next week. Mm-hmm.
