What You Feed Grows: Lessons from Regaining Focus After a Summer Break and Running My First 5K

How One Small Decision Helped Me Realign, Refocus & Remember Who I’m Becoming

Summer is slowing coming to an end. Here in Atlanta, the kids are headed back to school this week. If you’re up north or in the midwest, kids still have one month left of summer. The weather has been extremely hot, but for the first time, when I went to walk my dog this morning, it was actually cool, because of the rain. Personally, summer ends for me in September, after Labor Day. 

I’ve been MIA, and it wasn’t on purpose. I've been living my life, and not sharing or feeling the need to post. If you know or follow me, you would know how much I typically share. Life has been definitely all over the place. I’ve been blessed to experience some beautiful things this summer, on the other hand I had to grieve some heavy things too. Trying to balance the duality of life has been a struggle. Maybe we’ll dig into that in the future, but I’m still working thru it, plus today I have something else to talk about.

We’re over halfway through 2025, and that always makes me pause and take stock of my life. We’re just four days into August. New months, quarters, seasons, and years are natural reflection points for me. I like to step back, look at my goals, and track my progress. I’m constantly asking myself, “What do you want? And is what you’re doing moving you closer to that, or pulling you further away?” I think about the woman I ultimately want to be: What are her habits? What does her day-to-day look like? What’s important to her? Pausing to assess where you are, can help you determine if you need to adjust. 

At the beginning of June, during one of these reflection moments, I started to think about the habits that version of me would have. One thing that came to mind was that she’s a runner. She runs because she’s active, and running is one of her hobbies. After visualizing her, I asked myself, If future you is a runner, when’s the last time you actually ran? Back during COVID, I used to run (okay, more like slow jog) around my parents neighborhood, but I hadn’t truly run, besides quick sprints during workouts, since 2020.

One day, I was talking to a friend about how I have too much time on my hands and need a hobby. She asked what hobbies I was considering, and I told her, Honestly, anything and everything. She laughed and asked, Well, where will you start? and I said, Maybe running. She laughed even harder when I said, Yeah, I’m actually going to do a 5K. I had never run a 5K before; I hadn’t even looked one up. After we hung up, I searched for local races and found one that was just three weeks away.



I called one of my closest friends and casually said, Let’s run a 5K. She wasn’t active at all but has an athletic background from her childhood, so she agreed. We looked up how to train for our first 5K on ChatGPT. We made a whole plan and started run/walking every day, separately but holding each other accountable. Every day we’d check in and encourage each other. I signed us up for the race, and before we knew it, three weeks had flown by.

On June 21st, we ran our first 5K, and finished with a record-breaking (for us!) time of 33 minutes and 22 seconds. We placed 5th and 6th in our age group and ranked 33rd and 34th out of 201 runners. Crossing that finish line was such an amazing feeling because, honestly, I was just talking when I said I’d do it; I didn’t really expect to follow through. We always talk about how powerful our words are, but today I want to look at it a little differently: What you feed grows, and what you starve dies. It’s true what they say: Change your focus, change your future. The three weeks leading up to the race showed me that you can truly do whatever you put your mind to, you just have to get out of your own way.

For half the year, I focused on how big my goals were and how different I felt from the woman I envisioned myself becoming. Instead, I should’ve been focusing on aligning my current self with her. Running is a habit, that I saw my future self doing, but I told myself that current me couldn’t do it. I was feeding my distractions instead of my focus. I was feeding my distractions by focusing on what I didn’t have. I was feeding them by telling myself all the things I couldn’t do. I was feeding them with lies and believing them.

Lies like I’m not a runner. I don’t run.


Lies like I’m lazy and not disciplined.


Lies like I’ll start tomorrow.

Lies like I don’t deserve to become the woman I want to be.


Lies like I’ll be happy when I achieve XYZ.

The truth is, you can keep believing the lies your mind makes up or you can feed your focus and do the work. You’re not lazy, you’re just distracted. Remove the distractions and get to work. Proverbs 23:7 says, “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” What you focus on will be drawn to you. You have to change your thoughts. The enemy will try to make you believe you’re not enough but that’s a lie. Shift your focus. You can either see the glass as half empty or half full. Until you shift your thoughts and focus, you’ll keep feeding your distractions and stay stuck.

We have so much more to catch up on. This summer has truly been a rollercoaster, but I wanted to start here. You have five months left in the year, that’s more than enough time. Give yourself some grace and stop dwelling on how much of the year is gone, you still have time.