Striving For Financial Independence? Find Your Tribe

I track my annual cycling, running, hiking, and paddling miles on the right rail of this blog.  A significant portion of my readership comes to my blog for content related to health and fitness and my goal in showing my numbers is to inspire an increasingly sick and unhealthy nation to change their life through activity. 

I’ve received a few emails from readers who are amazed as to how I can be so consistent in my annual mileage totals.  To me it comes naturally, I simply make a routine and put it on autopilot.  Sure I shake things up now and then with a road trip or by doing different activities.  But for the most part I’m dialed in to a nice routine, and the fact that I don’t do a ton of traveling for my job anymore sure helps in keeping that routine. 

Last week a reader with a keen eye emailed me about my running total this year.  They observed the fact that I’m running a lot more, and they’re correct.  I’m on pace for about 700 miles this year – more than double last years total.

There’s a reason….

Peer Groups Raise All Boats

I’m well known in the D.C. cycling community, mainly because I do lots of group rides.  I do bike shop sponsored rides and even drop in sometimes with some of the local racing team training rides.  Road cycling is a sport that relies on drafting and thus riding in groups. 

Running on the other hand is different.  For years I tried to run with different groups and it never worked.  There’s really no drafting in running, at least not at the non-elite level. 

Every time I tried to run with a new group I’d find that I was either too slow for the fast folks, or too fast for the newer and slower runners.  In the D.C. area where there are TONS of super good athletes, it was often the former.  And very often those super-fast runners were kind of stand-offish to others like me who couldn’t keep up.

But this year I finally found a group of runners who not only train at my usual pace, but who are super cool folks and fun to be around.  They have a weekly Wednesday morning run at 6:00, and I started doing it in early January. 

We usually only do between 5-6 miles and then we hang out at a coffee shop for a while afterwards and talk.  Over the past 4 months I’ve gotten to know many of these folks very well and I now have a whole new set of friends – friends who care about their health and fitness – the best kind! 

I found my running tribe.  This has been a game changer for my running! 

Accountability Works

Most of my new running friends have a race or races coming up, and simply hearing their full training routines and diet protocols is awesome motivation.  I’ve learned from them, and found new tools to experiment with. 

One woman in my group had a cancerous tumor removed less than a year ago and runs ultra-marathons.  She recently completed a 100-mile race, less than a year out from a cancer diagnosis!  These folks are not just inspiring, but they also stir up the competitor in me.  I hear their stories and it makes me think “I wonder if I could do that?…” 

Some of my new friends are really fast runners but they use our group for slower training runs.  A few have run the Boston Marathon, which you have to be really fast to qualify for.  One girl name Katie does speed work at the track every week.  I joined her once and got my butt kicked. 

She can run a sub-6 minute mile, I cannot.  I can’t even go under 6:30 yet.  Holy shit it hurts so much to try.  But she’s super-cool and she’s been egging me on to continue training my speed to get under 6:30. 

At this point I feel accountable to her in a weird way even though we’ve never socialized once outside of post-run chats and I don’t even know her last name.  She’s just super nice and as far as running at least someone who I look up to and want to emulate. 

Human bonding in this way is powerful, we are social creatures!

Find Your Fi Tribe

If you’re striving for financial independence – and I hope you are – you’ll do yourself a huge favor by taking that journey with others.  Find your tribe and dive in. 

Full disclosure – I didn’t use that path to FI.  I’m naturally frugal and invested at an early age so it just happened to me ‘accidentally’ as my blog name suggests.  I had no peer groups to help me and none of my friends even knew I was stashing money away all those years.

But if you are finding things a bit more challenging in your journey you’ll speed things up by joining in with others, just as my running game is leveling up this year with my new group. 

There’s Facebook groups and blogs of course, but it doesn’t have to be all online and I actually recommend that it shouldn’t be.  Find a meetup group, go to a conference.  Meet others in person who are slashing debt, cutting costs, and investing wisely.  You’ll find inspiration in their stories and most importantly you’ll have accountability partners who will keep you honest about your own journey. 

Heck, you may even feel the urge to up your game to ‘beat’ them on savings or financial life hacks.  A little friendly competition never hurt anyone. 

Community

I’ve always been a bit of an introvert and enjoy solo activities more than most folks.  But this years experience with my new running tribe has been a big reminder that I need to balance my “solitudiness” with healthy doses of community.

So whether you’re searching for faster running times or to shorten your path to financial independence, get out there and find your tribe.  Benefits await.