Running can be a battle, and racing is even more of a battle. While immediate goals sometimes overshadow the purpose and utility of running as a sport in your life, it is important to take a step back from your day-to-day training plan and your immediate feelings in order to reassess what running is doing for you, and what role racing and hard efforts may play in your long-term mental and physical health.
The reason I’ve had such a positive relationship with running my whole life is because I try not to see any one race as the end-all be-all. I run because it helps me grow in my social relationships with quality people who teach me new things that I really care about. I run because I feel better during the day when my body feels strong and in shape. I run because racing and completing hard workouts show me over and over again that I can do what I set my mind to even when I’m having overwhelming doubts that are both rational and irrational. Running is the thing that reinforces my ability to believe in myself and my own potential for success when I am questioning the quality of everything else in my life. It shows me that ‘success’ is not always relative to other people or race times or anything else; that success can be comprised of finding that place of calm and contentment with the moment, not thinking that I should be somewhere else doing something else.
In high school and college, the focus was almost exclusively on race times and places, improving your PR’s, and qualifying for important races. I do think that that aspect of running is vital to self-realization as a person and athlete. The systematized racing and coaching that characterizes the student-athlete experience allows you to create and work toward specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely goals. The goals that my coaches have set for me have stressed me out and have seemed unrealistic at times, but my coaches have given me something to reach for when I wasn’t sure what I could really do, or when I was uncomfortable thinking about pushing myself further.
Once I have a goal in my head, I never want to fail. It hurts to think that you made some kind of mistake or came up short somehow. The truth is that running, just like everything else in life, is not a perfect little equation of getting out what you put in. Humans are not math problems. If everyone could achieve success by following the same formulas, the world would be a boring place. There are elements of our own bodies and minds that we cannot have complete control over, and racing shows us that even though we can’t have control over every little aspect of ourselves, we don’t need complete control. We need control over just the parts of our mind that say, “don’t stop unless you genuinely feel like your life is somehow at risk” (and through experience you learn that your life is very rarely ever really at risk), and over the part of our mind that says, “do your best, and your best will be enough.” We need the ability to introspect in the moment, and to creatively find solutions and methods to deal with our own ever-changing psychologies and mentalities.
“Don’t quit. You’re already in pain, you’re already hurt. Get a reward from it.”
-Anonymous
When you are focused on specific race after race, it can be difficult to simultaneously focus on running as an emotional and lifestyle tool with so much more potential. I used to get so utterly distressed and feel absolutely horrible before races simply due to nervousness and the expectations that I had for myself and that other people had for me to perform. I still get stressed before races, but it’s not as bad anymore. Things happen that we can’t control, and the negative possibilities are not worth fixating on. The benefit to racing is being able to have an opportunity to test yourself against other people, and to be around other people who have also worked hard to improve themselves. Racing is a gift and an opportunity. It’s a chance to showcase your best efforts, and then to fully analyze and understand the intersection of your physical and mental limits with a nonjudgmental eye once you are done.
There are no failures in running. It takes a mature athlete to realize that. There are times when it is important to be on top of your game as much as possible, and you can make choices that are counterproductive, but in the end, they are your choices. There are times you’ll realize that a choice you made was a bad one, but unless you made the bad choice on purpose, it will simply be an opportunity to learn and grow. You know your body and your mind better than anyone else, and as an athlete you are also subject to many elements of chance.
The long-term health mindset acknowledges that running is a thing to learn from, and it’s a way to find calm by enjoying a proactive activity. It’s a tool to keep your body and mind in shape. There is a personal balance of distance, pace, location, and racing that will be best for any one person’s mind and body. Still, we as individuals do not always know what is best for us or where our limits lie until we’ve reached some of those limits over and over; we can’t understand our limits until we’ve pushed ourselves to the outskirts of our minds and physical limits. Once you’ve reached those fringe states and mentalities over and over, you start to get a grasp on the slippery tentacles of pain and fear that most people avoid the second they are sensed, and you develop the ability to distinguish between the pain and fear that is helpful to your life, and that which simply gets in the way of the person you want to be.
Continue persevering forward during this difficult time! Enjoy the activities that are helping you find self-realization, and hold the people around you to high standards of rationality and empathy while treating them with love and kindness!
Josh