Just Watching

I like to tell myself stories about other parts of myself, but they aren't normally true. One story is that I'm not especially motivated by competition. The idea here isn't that I avoid competition. It's that I have some sort of higher goal of personal excellence, and that I view competition solely as a vehicle towards that goal. But it's a lie. I want to win things, too.

I watched the race today, and when I saw that they were going out at 5:20 pace, I thought there was a good chance I could have mixed it up with the leaders. When Oxy's new frosh won in 26:45, I began to wish I had found a way to enter that race - not for the sake of racing, but for the accolades that would come after doing well.

On the other hand, over the course of the last 15 hours my reptile brain has been slowly sinking back from the fore. Now, my thoughts are different. I think that if I had run today's race, and even won it, I would not feel very satisfied with that. I know that my summer preparation was sloppy and lazy, regardless of whether it was sufficient keep me in shape to win the slow race today. The point of running is that it's a personal quest. The great part is that you're in control of your own actions. You have choices. Part of running is making the choices about what the best preparation is. Another part is making the choice about whether or not you'll execute that preparation with a whole-hearted approach.

I've only been putting in that full effort these last two weeks, and maybe not even then as evidenced by my sporadic updating of the log and a couple of missed runs.

I would say that my goal for the immediate future lies deeper than particular race performances, and instead lies in a display of improved self-control, improved dedication, improved self-understanding, improved love of the sport. But a wise man once told me this:

You cannot set out to fall in love. If you go out making an effort to fall in love with someone, you'll eventually find a romantic relationship, but it will likely be forced. It will be with someone else who set out with that same goal, and both of you will be deluding yourselves into thinking you're in love.

On the other hand, if you set about your daily activities by fully engaging yourself and living in the way you think is best, you'll inevitably come to share that with like-minded people. Soon, you may wind up falling in love with one of them. But that can't be the goal - only the consequence.

Similarly, my goal shouldn't be to achieve breakthroughs as a runner. It shouldn't be to run much better or much faster or much smarter than before. That's too big a picture - too global. Instead, the goal is just to do, each day, what I think is best to race my next race as well as I can.

I'm not sure whether this will sound profound or ridiculous in the morning, but I had five beers before I realized Matt had simply fallen asleep while sitting up next to me watching a movie, and I don't really have much better to do than drunkblogging at the moment.