Four months on oxygen. Seventeen years to the finish line.
There’s a story behind that.
This is your daily message from Chad number 1195 to upgrade your mental game today by telling yourself a better story, because the most important story you hear is the story you tell yourself. This message is dedicated to Emma Tillman.
Here’s the upgrade:
You think stopping means you gave up, but upgraded thinking knows a pause is not a stop.
Here’s the story:
Emma Tillman ran her first marathon because a woman named Lisa French talked her into it at a road race in Memphis. Tillman finished that one, then ran two more the next year. What started as “let’s do a few of these together” turned into something bigger — fifty marathons, fifty states. They built entire trips around it. Fly out Thursday. Work remote Friday. Race Saturday morning. Home Sunday night. State by state, year after year, the map kept filling in.
Then, in 2011, a blood clot hit her lung. The pulmonary embolism hospitalized her and she spent four months on oxygen at home just to breathe normally again. But she got back up and kept adding states.
Then her body turned on her a second time — a chronic condition in her gut that meant IV fluids and supplemental nutrients just to stay nourished. Running wasn’t a discipline problem anymore. It was a body-won’t-let-you problem. She managed one marathon in 2019. Then nothing. No race for two full years. Then she put her toes on the start line again in 2021 and completed the Carmel Marathon in her home state of Indiana.
The, on August 16th of this year, seventeen years after Lisa French talked her into that first race, Emma Tillman crossed the finish line of the Anchorage RunFest Marathon in Alaska — state number fifty. She’s 46 now. She told a reporter she genuinely wasn’t sure she’d ever get there.
She still runs five or six mornings a week. What motivates her isn’t a goal as much as the community and camaraderie she’s found in running. It’s the conversation as much as the mileage. And she’s not finished setting goals. She wants a new half-marathon PR. She wants to break four hours.
Completing her 50 in 50 took her seventeen years. Those couple setbacks were big enough to end it for good. Zero of them did. The better story to tell yourself is, “A pause is not a stop.” Just imagine what’s still possible if you picked back up on the thing you paused, instead of calling it the thing you quit.
Tell me a story about a goal you paused but never quit on to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “What are you still working toward, even if you had to stop for a while?” You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, by going to fromchad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are always available at http://www.fromchad.com.
