What I learned losing a marathon
When I signed up for the Pittsburgh Marathon for my second year, I was certain I’d run a PR. I didn’t think I’d end up with my personal…
When I signed up for the Pittsburgh Marathon for my second year, I was certain I’d run a PR. I didn’t think I’d end up with my personal worst. I know all the reasons behind my particularly horrible run (we can talk about the shoes another time), and none of them appear in this list of lessons I learned in the last miles of my personal worst.
The moment you realize you’ve failed, you may still have a long way left to go on the effort overall.
In this marathon, I found out around mile 12 that I was going to be in for a particularly miserable run (about half a mile after the photo above). Not only did I get my foot crunched by a fellow runner, but I also hadn’t trained as well as I told myself I had. I had another dozen or so miles to drive home every failure of every training run I had while that news sunk in. Part of what kept me going was that I had no idea what I’d do if I stopped. I didn’t know how to get a hold of my husband, how to get myself home — so the only thing that seemed to make sense was to keep moving forward.
It wasn’t the first or the last time in life I’d feel that way.
Failure is a beginning as much as it is an end.
I didn’t want to give up running when I got home. I went home and essentially plotted achieving my actual PR, which I did the next year. I spent at least a year attempting to redeem this one, miserable run in my own mind. Whenever I’d feel particularly bad about my performance on something, I now had a pretty miserable ‘personal worst’ to compare it to, which helped me keep everything in perspective.
Just because you failed doesn’t mean you’re a failure.
I was raised by abusive Evangelicals that tried to make everything I did either a glorification of them or their god if it the effort was deemed good, and a condemnation of me if the effort was bad. I learned that at the end of my run I knew far more about myself as a person than I had at the beginning. In fact, I learned more about the reserves of my personal strength and will from any other marathon I’ve run.
But the biggest perspective gained was regarding my own viewpoint. After all, I lost a marathon, but I still ran one.
