How a Disastrous Marathon Triggered a Crisis of Self-Acceptance

The past week or so, I’ve felt lost. I’ve felt really lost. I ran a marathon that was my worst in years. I ran more than twenty minutes off my personal best, and I felt like dropping out half the race.

To me, running a 3-hour marathon and dropping out are essentially the same result: both are complete failures and days where I would give myself an F performance. I’m not trying to run 3 hours: I’m trying to run 2:35. The only reason I didn’t drop out was because dropping out of a marathon would leave you stranded on another side of the city. With road closures everywhere, it would take you forever to get back to the finish and get your phone, wallet, and keys.

On paper, it made sense why this particular marathon didn’t go so well. I’d run another marathon only two weeks before, and my legs were tired and not recovered.

It made sense that I was less than 100%, and my performance showed, and if I had had the right, positive mindset about my poor performance, I would have been grateful for the consolation prize: I finished.

On a really hard day, I didn’t give up. I never stopped. I never started walking. I still can confidently say I gave that race everything I had on that day and did my absolute best. I showed I had grit and resilience even on days that were my worst. And immediately after the race, I came down with the worst cold I’ve had this year, so that may have played into the bad day as well.

Most days, those consolation prizes and thoughts would have comforted me. This past week, they felt like bullshit. I ran like shit. No excuses. I wasn’t good enough. No excuses. I trained really hard for several months, averaging 70 miles a week, just to completely fall apart when it mattered most.

I don’t know why this mattered so much to me because I had plenty of bad races throughout my life. And there were plenty that went worse than this one. I thought I’d be above one bad race leading to a mental unraveling and this amount of emotional devastation.

But it felt like the best block of training and all the hard work I’d put in consistently for several months just completely went to waste with this one disastrous race.

People know I’m mentally over a bad race if I can talk about it, joke about it, then look forward to the next one. I can say a bad day is just a bad day and doesn’t define you.

This past week, I was silent. Unless prompted, I didn’t talk to anyone about running. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Some of my best friends encouraged me and said I would get it next time. People who usually say “good job” after a good race didn’t say anything — I don’t blame them, after all — what is there to say?

For some reason, I made my old mistake of putting so much stock into this race that a failure in this one marathon reflected, to me, an overall failure in my life.

. . .

Why shouldn’t I have been happy that I didn’t give up, like a lot of people would? I started to think about what was so disconcerting about not being able to run as well as I wanted, and being so off my goals. I realize it’s because my standards became so high and increasingly rigid.

For a few years, I encountered almost linear success. Personal life is still personal life, and I encounter challenges to resolve to become a better husband, friend, and follower of Christ in my pursuit to follow my ideals.

But in terms of ambition, I have achieved a lot and kept advancing myself beyond what I expected. I got into law school, have done relatively well in law school, ran personal bests in the marathon, half marathon, and 10 milers, and have kept advancing in my career and achieved positive outcomes for a lot of my students in special education.

And I got greedy. I wanted more of that self improvement. I wanted more of that same success.

For all I’ve spoken about my past experiences taking running too seriously, here I was, taking running too seriously. I saw it as an allegory for life. If I could gameplan a marathon with the right strategy, then that means I could use that strategy for life. I finally discovered how important tactics were — go out slow, don’t make any unnecessary surges, time your move well. And for a while, smart tactics were broadly extremely helpful in success.

My favorite thing to do while watching the track races and marathons is to watch the winner throughout. Very rarely are they leading from the front from start to finish. Often, they position themselves well, make their move when it counts, and leave just enough in the tank to obliterate their opposition.

But sometimes people just win because they had a good day. Sometimes people just win because they’re lucky and other people have a bad day. Alternatively, sometimes people just win because they’re the best. They can make a million mistakes, fall, and still win because they’re just better than their opponents. Sometimes, the winner is just so talented and naturally gifted it’s just not fair.

All the tactics, strategy, and doing the right things in the world can’t make up for a bad day. Just eating right, sleeping right, and having good tactics on race day are not guarantees of success.

I’ve learned that the hard way hundreds of times in my life. But this time, it felt different.

. . .

For the past several years, I’ve had a two-part mantra in my head that I largely credit with the positive outcomes in my life.

The first is the tactic of not making any big surges or sudden moves that would drain all of my energy. This energy conservation in races, but also in daily life, helps me get through the day and prepare myself for the biggest moments.

The second is telling myself “this is where I’m supposed to be.” This is a means of radical trust and self-acceptance in the fact that God put me in this situation and I shouldn’t resist or do anything overly erratic. I’m here for a reason. This is where I’m supposed to be, and I will do my very best in my present situation.

The second has been a big affirmation and honest life-saver at times, since it’s helped me stay calm and stopped me from panicking that I’m not doing enough or that I’m doing everything wrong. It has made me significantly more confident, and not the woo-woo pretending like you always have everything together confident, but a deep internal confidence.

Since I genuinely believe that wherever I am is wherever I’m supposed to be, I am focused and committed to accepting myself and accepting my situation. I feel, as a result, like I have, somehow, been compelled into where I am and will be compelled into the next situation. I was able to see the nuance in how to handle each challenge and situation instead of a rigid, black-and-white framework where only my goal was a success, and anything else was a failure.

The mantra has made me an extremely flexible person who does the best with the cards dealt and the conditions on the day instead of a super rigid person with X or Y goal, and who is an absolute failure when I don’t meet that goal. It’s kept me grounded and able to do my very best on days I don’t get the best sleep or have a lot of personal challenges. I was able to find a lot of comfort in the consolation prizes instead of always having to be first place.

Sometimes, I have strayed from the path and tried to manipulate my conditions. I’ve tried to intentionally put myself in situations where I would meet more success instead of responding to the conditions and barriers life throws at me.

And this past week is a time I’ve strayed. This past week was a time when I didn’t meet my goal and felt like I was a complete failure. This past week was the black-and-white thinking I spent years trying to free myself from.

I felt like I had been stagnant in marathons for a time and did not want to accept that running a three-hour marathon was where I was supposed to be. As such, I blew up my framework for approaching life for a bit and started to try productivity hacks like the Pomodoro Technique to get myself through life and through the days.

It would usually work well for a couple of hours before I felt some sort of emotional dysregulation and crash, realizing that segmenting my day in super rigid, military-like blocks of time and forcing myself to get X or Y task done in that time was the exact rigidity I had earlier in my life that felt horribly constraining.

. . .

This past week, because of the marathon that caused me to be completely despondent and have an identity crisis, I regressed into old, bad habits and the black-and-white thinking that made me miserable, inflexible, and rigid.

I don’t want to beat myself up for it because it’s easy to realize why. It’s really easy to trust you are wherever you’re supposed to be when you’re doing well and on top of the world. It’s easy to be confident of your place in the world when that place is at the peak of the mountaintop. This has been the case for me for much of the past two years.

I could accept myself, get through challenges, and accept I was where I was supposed to be — under the condition that I would always meet a positive outcome again.

With this last marathon, I was disheartened enough that I did not see that positive mountaintop. And so I panicked, lost faith, and felt like I needed to burn down the framework that has helped free me, mature me, and make me a much healthier version of myself than adhere to it.

Of course it’s easy to trust when things are going well. And of course it’s hard to trust when they’re not.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve started to regain that trust that I am where I’m supposed to be. As someone who’s occupied between 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. most weekdays between work and law school night classes, thinking my schedule was ideal for being able to be an Olympic-level marathoner was, well, a bit misguided and delusional.

A friend mentioned to me that very few people could keep up running as a hobby with that schedule, and most people wouldn’t put running as a top priority with those obligations. For lack of a better term, I would probably need to “take the L” in running for as long as I could barely find any time to run without compromising being able to get eight hours of sleep.

I think he’s very right. And I think accepting being mediocre at something is okay right now given the balancing act at the moment. Accepting that I might not be the best at everything (but will try) is a much healthier path forward than this rigid “if it’s not an A, it’s a failure” or “if it’s not a personal best, it’s a failure” mentality.

It might sound strange that someone would feel so despondent and have an existential crisis over running a 3-hour marathon.

But I realized earlier in the week I couldn’t just snap myself out of it. I needed this journey of intense doubt and struggle to realize this once again, stronger than ever before.

This is where I’m supposed to be, no matter the outcome.

—

This post was previously published on The Partnered Pen.

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