I read this last night - and re-read it today; it is worth spending 5 minutes of your day, because it makes you realize just how damn lucky we are as runners.
One of my favorite lines in the 2002 movie "The Rookie" comes when the aging hero Jimmy Morris, discouraged from the stress of the minor league circuit, wanders over to watch a Little League game from the outfield. Returning to the clubhouse, he tells a teammate, "You know what we get to do today, Brooks? We get to play baseball."
I was reminded of this perspective-changing ability of youth when I interviewed Alana Hadley on the eve of the USATF Cross Country Championships in February. Alana, barely 14, was the youngest competitor on the start list, running her first USATF race. With no pressure to run a certain time or place, nor a team counting on her performance, she was brimming with excitement at being able to toe the line at a championship against runners she'd only heard about before. "When I get into big races like this," Alana said, "they actually are better for me. I tend to do better when I get excited, when I'm all super-happy about a race."
In contrast, I realized I had been nervous about my race in the masters field for several weeks, since my training hadn't progressed exactly as planned and the likelihood of running my goal time became increasingly in question. While I, like Alana, had no team to hold up or anyone counting on me to run a certain time or place, my self-imposed goals loomed large enough to dampen nearly all of my excitement about running in this race.
"You have to think about it, why do people run?" Alana told me. "If you're doing it and not enjoying it, there's really no purpose in doing it." Out of the mouth of babes, they say.
Why was I racing? While a lucky(?) few get to run for their living, the rest of us, no matter how serious we take it, are doing this for recreation. This isn't news, but somehow I need to be reminded of it often. I was running the race because it had given me a focus for training over the winter, because I enjoy the challenge of cross country, and mostly, because I could: to celebrate being 46 and still running strong (for me, although I regularly need to revise my idea of what strong is these days).
None of these reasons would change whether I ran 29 minutes or 35 minutes for the 8K the next day, and no one but me cared. All of the pressure came from comparing my self-image with my reality and falling short, or fearing that I would. Granted, the pressure I put on myself is part of why I race: Setting an audacious goal, being afraid of it, and then conquering it is one of life's great joys. But when that pressure causes me to approach a starting line with more fear than excitement, something has gone wrong.
I thought about this more as I researched the story in this issue on kids' mileage. Time after time, experts said the key issue is that it has to be fun for the kids. "Fun," however, can be tricky. Few would find running 3 hours to exhaustion fun or how they would want to spend most Saturday mornings. I think we want to teach our children how to enjoy this type of fun. But I came to the conclusion that where the fun stops is when the runner isn't choosing to do it, and/or expectations exceed the runner's ability.
It occurred to me that this isn't limited to kids: The same can be said for adult runners. Regardless of where the pressure comes from, if we've stopped enjoying running or racing because it's something we have to do or because we're unable to live up to our expectations, we need to revise something.
David Ramsey, coach of the successful youth team Brocaw Blazers of Kansas City says, "Our kids go to the starting line laughing." Of course, there's a place for focus, and the lack of a smile doesn't always mean something isn't enjoyable. But maybe going to the line laughing--confident in our training, celebrating our health and fitness, ready to do something really hard that we love--is a good goal for all of us.
I was still nervous on the morning of the race, and, as it turned out, I didn't run my goal, but I was still glad I raced. In my next race, my goal was challenging, but more realistic. And, thanks in part to Alana, I went to the starting line thinking, "You know what we get to do today? We get to race!"
**credit to Running Times
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