Shift your sites
Keep engaged by pushing farther
So you’ve gotten there, the big there, the goal that was your goal. Whether it was a time, a route, or a race; you made it, and it felt easy (enough).
What’s next?
In a running practice that’s more about the time you put in than the milestones that you reach (literally), what do you do when you achieve one? Do you quit running, like so many people who decide they’re going to “do” the Boston or New York marathons and then never run again? Do you keep on with what you’ve been doing, focusing on ever-smaller details in a sort of martial-arts-movie-style pursuit of perfection? Neither, I think, are particularly attractive. But neither is the obvious alternative: to push farther.
If you’re never going to win a race, or get paid, or be interviewed, or whatever your preferred marker of external success might be, why push farther? What’s the point?
The point is to simply see if you can. Sculptor Henry Moore once told the poet Donald Hall that “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.” That thing that you can never possibly do? Run every run, race every race, or hit every time. Whether or not you devote your life to running, you can never win at running. There’s nothing and no one to win against except your yesterday self.
I recently reached a goal: to easily run this one 5 mile loop that always intimidated me because it also has a 435 ft elevation gain. And, as you know from previous posts, I often set my goals as routes to conquer. After weeks of build up, practicing the course, last week, it finally (finally!) felt easy (enough). What now?
Now, I change the route. I shift the roads. I add some mileage, yes, but since mileage isn’t my thing, I won’t add very much. What I will take on is the mental challenge of new ups and downs, new scenery, new traffic and houses and points where I wonder why the f*** I do this?!
That’s the secret to keeping in your practice: to find newness in it by pushing yourself to do things differently. It can be annoying. It can be brutal. It can, in fact, result in defeat. But the risk is the point. It’s a tiny risk, compared to those that people are forced to take every day, but it’s one you didn’t have to take, that no one forced you into. And that’s powerful, because it means that win or lose, the high is all your own.
Go run.