Running – Sometimes it’s not about the Destination

How was your race at the weekend? Did you feel you were successful, or have you spent most of this week feeling like a failure?

Take a moment to reflect, redefine and reframe what success looks like because success doesn’t always mean achieving your goals, success can equate to doing your best work on the day. 

Let’s unpick this a bit further, way back when you started thinking about the race that you’ve just run, I’m sure you began with an intention to achieve the race, to achieve running your chosen distance which might have been out of your comfort zone. We love to feel good about the intention of achieving something, anticipating the success, the feeling of greatness.

However, what was the process that you went through to get from the intention of running your race to the start of your training, and then to complete your training. What skills have you learnt to get past anticipating the race to lining up on the start line. Some people never get passed the intention of doing a race.

For me, success lies in how you executed the training process, numbers on race day can be important, but they never give the full picture of what has been achieved in the months prior to an event.

And let’s have a reality check, training runs are worlds apart from race days; race days are busy, noisy, crowded and claustrophobic. The rhythmic movement of your feet that create ease and relaxation in your body is a distant memory on race day as you dodge other runners, their support crew, pedestrians and at worst the emergency services.

 In training runs we leave behind our daily hassles, the stressors, the planning, the half-finished conversations and become present in meditative moments, often existing in the camaraderie of an unspoken language with our running buddy; at best we finish and have full conversations that offer enrichment and fulfillment to our day. 

On race day the stressors return with a vengeance, like a massive racking ball, knocking the wind out of our sails which can leave the dregs and the sorry remnants of success, that are replaced with feelings of failure, unhappiness, and at times, an overriding sense of disappointment.

The training process should be celebrated, saluted, and remembered with passion; your resilience is strengthened, your running skill set added to, and your ability to perform under pressure has been tried and tested. You survived and your guts at achieving an intended risk all those months ago should fill you will pride.