Qualify for the Boston Marathon the DREAMS Cycle ™ Way

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!