The last and only time I qualified for the Boston Marathon was
in 1996 at the Toronto Marathon. There, I ran my first and only sub-3-hour
marathon. I then competed in Boston in the spring of 1997. I captured this monumental
achievement in a memoir, Take 10 and Reach
the Boston Marathon.
Since then, I’ve had my ups and downs in terms or running,
from running a couple of 50K ultramarathons, to having some health issues and
injuries that curtailed my running dramatically. Lately, with my wife starting
to run again, I feel more invigorated and ready to challenge myself again with
the goal of qualifying for Boston.
Qualifying for the Boston Marathon is no simple endeavor. It
requires commitment, dedication and a solid plan. This is where the DREAMS
Cycle ™ comes in. When I qualified for Boston 20 years ago, I was studying at
the University of Ottawa for a Master’s degree in Educational Counseling. One
of the courses I completed as part of my degree was on counseling approaches.
The major assignment for the course consisted of developing your own personal
counseling model.
After much soul-searching, I created the DREAM cycle
approach. DREAM was an acronym for Dreams, Reality, Explore options, Action
plan, and Monitor. The visual that I associated with the DREAM cycle was of a
bicycle, which was appropriate at the time as I was heavily involved in
triathlons. The spoke on the wheels of the bicycle represented the letters of
the acronym, while the wheel represented a continuous cycle. The bicycle also
meant to indicate that the person on the bicycle was in the driver seat. The
professor gave me an A for that elaborate model.
I translated the DREAM cycle into a guide for running, Plan on Running
Your Best. This has been available for free for quite a few years. It is a
little technical in certain areas and is now quite dated as it is paper-based. Over
the next two decades, I used the DREAM cycle and the guide, while refining the
model which evolved into the DREAMS Cycle ™. This time the acronym stands for:
D for Dreams
and Desires
R for
Reasons and Reality
E for
Explore possibilities and Establish SMART goals
A for
Acquire knowledge and Action plan
M for Move
forward and Monitor progress
S for Stay
motivated/focused and Seek support
C for
Celebrate and Cycle back
The DREAMS Cycle ™ is a systematic approach to helping
people reach their dreams.
Explaining the DREAMS Cycle ™ can be rather dry, and
grasping the concept and the process can be challenging. You need pertinent and
interesting practical examples to facilitate comprehension. Describing the
DREAMS Cycle ™ through my experiences of attempting to qualify for the Boston
marathon will allow me to reach my objective of qualifying for Boston while providing
a great example of how to use the DREAMS Cycle ™. Thus, the creation of this
blog, Qualify for the Boston Marathon the DREAMS Cycle ™ Way!
