It’s easy to lose perspective in any aspect of life. While I’m specifically talking about running today, I find that this happens to me in anything I do. It has to do with the comparison trap and never feeling like enough.
When I first started running, I didn’t take it very seriously. I was doing it purely as cross training for swimming in the off-season. The fastest girls on my team were way out of my league and now run for schools like GW, Georgetown, and UNH. I never compared myself to them because I didn’t see myself as a “runner.” The other girls were about the same speed as me but I didn’t really care about beating them once I had secured my spot as a top 7 runner to make varsity.
as you can see, we took our running seriously
When I joined the track team freshman year in college, I was viewed as an outsider. The other girls didn’t take me seriously because I didn’t take myself seriously. I wasn’t a threat to anyone and I didn’t consider myself to be good. I was just a swimmer join randomly joined the team. After running my first 5k on the track and blowing everyone’s expectations, including my own, out of the water, their opinions began to change. The thing is, mine didn’t, so I carried on as I always had. The swimmer who happened to like running.
I was fast because I didn’t care. Whenever I went into a race with zero expectations, I did my best. The minute I felt pressure, I’d crack. I will never forget conferences that year when my coach literally told me before my 5k that if I didn’t place top 8, our biggest rival was going to beat us. I ran and placed, but I didn’t run nearly as fast as I was capable of.
The second and last time I broke 20 minutes in a 5k
Fast forward to sophomore year and all I could think about was how fast I was freshman year and I wanted to be even better. I overdid the running during swim season so I would be in “running shape” by the time I joined my track teammates in March. That backfired, because the pressure I put on myself stopped me from having a quality track or swim season. I also had knee surgery the month before track started.
I was in a very intense relationship with “iceman” for about a month. he was clingy.
Junior year I quit swimming and finally saw myself as a runner. I ran a very respectable half marathon time with no training other than the mileage my coach had given me for pre-season. I joined cross country and mentally psyched myself out. Track season was much of the same. My coach had told me how great a year it would be for me since I was finally running year round and instead I ran the worst times I’ve run in my life. I felt like I let myself, my coach, and my teammates down because it wasn’t the season I had been hoping for.
When I quit cross country this year, it was primarily due to injury, but I also wanted to find that enjoyment that I initially had with the sport again. Over the course of the last 4 years, I lost perspective. I began running as a swimmer and once I switched over to full time running, I had hoped that I would suddenly become this elite runner on my team. That didn’t happen, though, because it wasn’t fun anymore. I began stressing before every meet to beat my times and run higher mileage so my pace would drop and none of that happened. Instead I ended up more injured and more unhappy.
Even this half marathon that I ran a couple weeks ago had that same pressure. It was a distance I already knew and therefore was comparing myself to my first one. Blogging comes into play with the mental block, too. It seems like everybody and their brother runs half marathons and runs them fast. Here I was thinking my 1:38 was an awesome time and then I see someone else go casually run a sub-1:30. While I know that I shouldn’t be comparing myself to anyone else, it is hard to stay immune to those feelings of comparison, both internally and externally.
Somewhere during my running journey, I lost perspective. I run for fun. I run for me. I run because it makes me feel good. I don’t run to PR. I don’t run to burn calories. I don’t run to see how high my mileage can go. And I most certainly don’t run so that I can compare myself to other runners and bloggers. Running is about running and only running. It’s just a sport. A sport I love, but still, just a sport.
I have a lot to think about right now in regards to where I want my running to go. I’m finally at a place where I enjoy it. It makes me happy and I love being able to lace up my shoes and run without any sort of plan. I have races on my agenda, but I don’t have any goals in mind other than to enjoy them. I’m making a lot of decisions right now about running in the coming months but what I do know is that my primary concern is staying injury free.
I think that’s a big part of why I stopped doing my weekly training logs on Sundays. I want running to be a personal thing and while I still track my mileage on daily mile, it was easier to detach my running from the blog world to stop analyzing every detail over the internet. Eventually the logs may come back, but for now, I’m going to continue living in my carefree running bliss where it doesn’t matter if I run 3 miles or 50 in a week. Let’s be real though, in my head, it still does matter. Like everything else, it’s a work in progress.
Do you feel like you lose perspective?
Does blogging make you feel like you have to live up to a certain standard?
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