Information You Need
Today’s elite athletes are probably a full 30 seconds-1 minute faster than they were when I was competing. In commenting on that fact, sometimes people ask me if I’m at all disappointed that I didn’t run as fast as today’s athletes when I was young.
The answer is no: I am not disappointed. I started training in the 80s, when people smoked indoors and when running shoes were basically platforms of foam with very little thought put into them otherwise. I competed in the 90s, when long distance running was a low funded, niche interest and when female athletes had almost no pathways to viable careers, meaning that anyone with an eye towards their existence after college had to have doubts about continuing in the competitive landscape. Even when your life was running, you had to have an eye towards life after running.
Slowly, things shifted. Athletes now are faster than they were when I was growing up, and that is due to a combination of health, technical, and economic interest. There are probably some other reasons in addition to these, but those are the ones that seem quite obvious. I don’t look at the data people post today and compare it to the data I have access to from yesterday. Today and yesterday are two separate things.
Information that is important is information that will support you to get out on the road. Rarely is that support in the form of comparison, doubt, or shame. If the data that you’re gathering from your watch or your Strava feed or your Runners World article about Harry Styles’ marathon time makes you feel any of these emotions, then that data is of no interest to you. Put it down and do your best to wipe it from your memory.
Try this: run without a watch. Or, if you must wear one, wear a cheap analog watch. You don’t need to know your splits down to the second; you don’t even need to know your mile time at any granularity more fine than a 30 second interval. Try this out for a week or maybe two, and see how you feel about running. At first, I imagine it will feel like you’re at sea, very disoriented, because you’re used to the solid comfort of knowing exactly how badly you’re disappointing yourself or exactly how virtuously you’re impressing yourself that day. But over a few days, you’ll see the need for information drop away from you. Because the information that you’re gathering on your singular runs is enough. It is information about yourself, today. It is the information you need for your run tomorrow. It’s the only data that matters. It’s the information you need. Go run.
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