In this Good Enough in Practice episode, Shannon shares some exciting news: She just bought a plane ticket to Portugal, where she will walk the Camino de Santiago in 2020! She’ll walk 175 to 200 miles by herself over the course of ten to fourteen days. In this episode, Shannon and Janine talk about this personal challenge, how she’s preparing for it and her advice for pursuing your own personal challenges.
Discussion topics include:
- Some of the logistics of the trip
- Why the heck Shannon wants to do this (it’s all about the challenge)
- How Shannon will train (physically and mentally) to walk 10 to 15 miles a day for two weeks
- Shannon’s concern about avoiding overtraining
- What Shannon’s husband, Mike, thinks about this personal challenge
- Deciding whether to book hotel rooms or be more spontaneous on this trip
- Paying attention to what you’re wondering about and whether that might be a good challenge to take on
- Making small commitments on the way to a larger challenge
- Shannon’s criteria for a personal challenge: for it to be doable but not easy
- Janine’s concerns for Shannon’s safety on this journey (and the precautions she’ll be taking)
- Advice for starting a personal challenge: Notice the ideas that pop up over and over again and commit to something small. Then increase the commitment as you get closer to the ultimate goal.
- The importance of taking some action on your personal challenge every day
- How Shannon’s cartooning fits into this
- The impact of Shannon’s trip on our podcast schedule (spoiler alert: there will be no disruption!)
Links:
- Wikipedia article on The Portuguese Way, the Camino de Santiago routes that start in Portugal (just in case you’re curious)
- Shannon’s blog post, How I Give My Dreams Wings
- Shannon’s blog post, Training for a Real or Metaphorical Marathon
What an exciting personal challenge you have set for yourself, Shannon! I hope you enjoy it as much as you are looking forward to it. It will be quite an accomplishment.
My personal challenge is to write for a minimum of an hour each day in January and February and see if I can get a rough draft of my novel done. I am getting a desk on the 2nd so that I can actually sit down to my computer. My ex is giving it to me before his move so I have to wait until he is done with it. It will be nice to be actually able to sit down at a desk and write. Right now I have the computer set up on my coffee table and have to balance the keyboard and mouse on my lap. Not conducive to a good writing session.
In listening to your podcasts and reading Janine’s posts about NaNoWriMo, I realized that it is not as intensive as I had thought. I figured you would be writing for 5-6 hours a day to get your word count, but it sounds as if it’s more like 1-2 hours. I can do this!
Thanks, Christy! I (this is Shannon) hope so, too.
As for the writing, yes, you can totally hit 50k in a month in 1-2 hrs a day. I wasn’t so concerned about quality (or even cohesiveness, really) so I just sat down and typed as quickly as I could and never wrote for more than an hour a day, and hit my 50k a day or two early.
Give yourself permission to do just get words down, and get that initial rough draft done. Then you can take more time to go back and edit, refine, add, whatever needs to happen. You can absolutely do this Christy! If you want support while you’re doing it, share your progress in the GTGE Facebook group and we will happily cheer you on! https://www.facebook.com/groups/190827261557108/