Running Is the Best Analogy for Life

I’ve been running competitively for the past 12 years, with five marathons and three half marathons under my belt. I woke up suddenly around 2:45 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep, and I have another marathon in four hours where I’m going for a personal best. I hope to run 2:35 in the marathon or go under 5:55 mile pace for the entire marathon.

Dozens of times, I wanted to call it quits on running. Five months ago was one of these periods. I was taking it too seriously and burnt out trying to focus on running personal bests and fast times. I loved my friends and the people I met — the competitions and actually running, maybe not so much.

It’s been a very strong love-hate relationship with the sport.

And I am certainly not alone.

Every competitive runner both loves and hates the sport

I had a lot of friends that were super hardcore about running in high school and then fell out of love with it. Most of them barely run anymore and are into other hobbies like weight-lifting, swimming, or more frivolous things like fantasy football.

I had even more friends that were super hardcore about running in college and now barely run anymore — maybe they run to stay healthy or lose weight, but competitive running, for most of us, is a thing of the past as we realized there are much more important things in life.

I had one friend, Jake, who was on the verge of breaking four minutes in the mile. He ran for a Division I collegiate program, and he was incredibly talented. A lot of serious collegiate runners take what is called a “redshirt season,” which means they don’t run races freshman year to maintain eligibility for a fifth year of collegiate running.

Jake was always super fast and fit while healthy. The problem was he was almost never healthy. He had stress fracture after stress fracture. He had maybe three healthy seasons of running in four years. Before what would have been his fifth year, he had a serious injury again.

He decided to forgo his fifth year, graduate from college, and live a normal life where he runs maybe once a week to stay fit, and just does normal person things. Although he doesn’t run anymore, he does go on six hour hikes through mountains and very hilly terrains.

He doesn’t run anymore, and it’s not because he doesn’t love it or he’s not good at it. He was just tired of getting injured so often, and couldn’t handle it anymore.

The lesson is runners tend to be more intense than your average person. In my experience, runners can be a lot more intense than your average person. It takes a special kind of person to look forward to running 120 miles per week and put your body and mind through that kind of stress on a consistent basis. I don’t know if running lends itself to making people more intense, or whether super-intense people naturally gravitate toward running.

For me, running has been tons of highs and lows. There was a period of time where it was my everything. No, I never let my academics slide just because I was running competitively, but I did orient my whole life around running. That wasn’t very healthy.

Now, I’m pretty casual about it. I run when I can. I run when I feel like it, and don’t run when I don’t feel like it. I run as slow as I need to on a given day, and my friends joke that “I see you posted your walk as a run today” because my easy runs are so slow. I learned I can only give so many hard efforts every week, and races are those efforts.

This keeps me having fun with the sport. This keeps it a hobby instead of something I do super competitively all the time. There is way more out there in life, and keeping it a small part of my life, personally, has been greatly helpful.

Running teaches us that life is never linear

But running has taught me that progress and life, especially, are never linear. The journey of progress and improvement is never linear.

Many people think of Eliud Kipchoge as the greatest marathoner and distance runner of all time. Just when he broke two hours in the marathon (in a non-ratified race track), but ran 2:01:39 in real-world conditions, I thought that was it. I thought he reached the pinnacle of human performance, at least for another decade or so.

Plus, Kipchoge is old. He is 37 years old, and three years away from being a Master’s runner. I don’t mean 37 is old for regular people, but it is old for world-class marathon runners.

And yet he did it again. A few weeks ago, he broke his real-world marathon record by thirty seconds. He did it in an unbelievable way too: the pacer took him out way too fast, under two-hour marathon pace. Kipchoge’s races are usually evenly paced and methodical — on this one, he chased for the stars and hung on.

But Kipchoge’s journey to greatness was not simple either. He started on the professional circuit with a bang: he beat two of the best runners of all time in the 2003 World Championships 5,000 meters. But then he would pale in comparison to these runners on the track. He would never win a gold medal over his marquee track event after 2003, but he was consistently a world-class runner who just happened to peak at the wrong time in history.

Kipchoge’s move to road racing in the half marathon and marathon came only after his career in the 5,000 meters fizzled out. In the 2012 Kenyan Trials for the Olympics, he failed to make the Olympic team.

Since then, we know Kipchoge as the best marathoner in history.

The person that eclipsed Kipchoge for his whole track career, Kenenisa Bekele, has not met such success. He has not been so lucky. While Kenenisa Bekele dominated over the 5,000 meters and 10,000 meters on the track, he has also moved up to the marathon and had significant portions of training interrupted due to injury.

Bekele’s marathon career peaked when he ran 2:01:41, just two seconds slower than Kipchoge’s record at the time. Since then, he hasn’t run as fast and has had even more injuries. Just two weeks ago, Kenenisa Bekele, at 40 years old, broke the Master’s (40+) world record in 2:05:53.

For Bekele, this is not a fast time, and I’m sure the Master’s world record is an afterthought to him after being a multiple-time Olympic Champion and world record holder. But he acknowledged in a post-race interview that for how interrupted his training had been, it was still good progress and a good stepping stone. He acknowledged he wasn’t at his rival Kipchoge’s fitness per se, and before he’d go head to head against him, he would need to show something

Both runners are inspiring to me, not because of their successes, but their hardships.

That might sound like a cliche, but my own running journey parallels that of Bekele’s marathon career more than it does of Kipchoge. Of course, I’m not nearly as fast as either man, but six months ago, I was in the shape of my life.

And then I had to reconsider my relationship with running. I was peaking with running 80 miles a week at points, but I was going to start law school at night along with working a pretty draining and consuming job during the day. I requested not to be coached anymore for that reason, and then I went through a bout of injury and illnesses that severely interrupted my training.

When I came back from about six weeks of interrupted training, I was in terrible shape. Every run I went on felt like I was going to die, not only because I wasn’t fit, but because it would be 80–95 degrees when I did try to run.

A couple of weeks in, I was able to put in a couple of thirty-mile weeks. I decided to run an all-out local 10k to see where I was. I ran just under 40 minutes, or around 6:35 pace. It was also incredibly difficult to do so.

For me, this was a pace that just four months earlier would have been a faster-than-usual jog. And now it was an all-out effort.

Needless to say, it was discouraging, and I was focused on work and law school to not put any pressure on myself. My schedule is I work 7:50–3 p.m. and then go to school in the evening, so it’s hard to fit running and training into that schedule, too.

But I somehow did get back into shape, through the combination of getting up early every day to run, the weather getting better, and staying the course. Now, I feel like I’m in the best shape of my life again.

It’s been a very up-and-down journey back to fitness. But that’s life in general. This non-linear path of progress and improvement has shown me that you can’t dictate your terms for life. You can have goals, and you can put in work towards those goals. But unexpected derailments like injury, illness, and personal tragedy do happen.

What I’ve learned, for me personally, is I’m always where I’m supposed to be. If I have a slow run and bad workout, it’s a sign that my body needs to recover. The same goes for a day when I’m burnt out at work. Listening to my mind and body and telling myself when I need to slow down (especially for a season of high stress) has been pivotal towards growth.

Sometimes, it almost feels like I’m responding to God or something subconscious, but the fact is that trusting I’m always where I’m supposed to be has worked out. It’s certainly helped me be kinder and more accepting of myself rather than my old model of having uncompromising standards with limited flexibility.

To a certain extent, running is just running. And an analogy is just an analogy. Maybe a lot of life can’t fit the same rules of knowing when to push, knowing when to scale back, knowing when to take things seriously and knowing when not to take things seriously.

But it’s a mental framework that works out for me. Today, maybe I’ll hit my goal. Maybe I won’t. No matter what happens, I trust I am where I’m supposed to be.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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