I belong to a Facebook group that bills themselves as the slow runner group. I don’t know exactly what their criteria are, but I am very sure that I qualify handily. Someone in the group posed the question, “what makes a runner slow?” Of course, one can only be slow in comparison with someone who is faster.
There is a very natural urge to compare ourselves with others in many different facets of our life. But it is hard to think of a single activity that lends itself more to comparison than sports and, in particular, sports where achievement can be measured with nothing more than a stopwatch. From the 100-yard dash to full distance Ironmans covering 140.6 miles, from ten-second races to races where the finishing time ranges from eight to 17 hours, all of these events measure the athletes solely as a function of time.
In endurance sports in particular, the focus on time is pervasive: between course cutoffs, mile or km splits, swim/bike/run/transition splits, there are plenty of opportunities to measure ourselves against the clock — and against each other.
Jeff Van Gundy, who was the head coach of the New York Knicks in the late 90s and early 2000s, who I have not generally regarded as a great philosopher of sports, nevertheless came out with one of the most profound short sayings I have ever heard. He said, “comparison is the thief of joy.”
This brings up two separate but related points: (1) the dangers of comparison, and (2) the oft-forgotten concept that the reason we get up off the couch to begin with is to provide us with joy. Whether you want to get thinner, fitter, active, healthier, or whatever other surface motivation you use to get yourself out of bed and onto the road or the track or into the pool, at root, is the desire to be “happier”, i.e., to be more joyful. It is ironic that we can get trapped into the belief that we will be happier when we are faster because we can only be faster if someone else is slower. “Wait”, you may say, “I don’t care how much faster I am than anyone else, I only want to be faster than I was last month (or last season, or last year).” But that argument makes my next point, that sometimes the greatest thief of joy is our constant desire to compare ourselves with ourselves. The self-comparison is just as destructive to our underlying goal of being active in order to provide ourselves with joy. If you were faster in high school or college or before you broke your foot or before you gained the weight, and you focus on that comparison, then you are sublimating your potential for enjoying your activities in the present, wth feelings of contempt that where you are in the present is somehow less than where you have been in the past.
Stop looking back over your shoulder.
One of the reasons I love endurance sports, especially long course endurance sports, is because the enormity of the distance provides its own challenge and reward somewhat divorced from the speed at which you can complete the race. While I am very impressed with my coach’s ability, as a professional triathlete, to cover 140.6 miles in around nine-and-a-half hours, I am equally impressed that a father or mother with a full-time job can finish that same course in under seventeen hours. I am also equally impressed by those who cross the finish line of a full iron distance race more than 17 hours after the start, which in IRONMAN events, is a DNF. One of the most impressive, heart-warming and emotional race reports I have read is from someone who was last past the finish line at IRONMAN Louisville last month, earning a DNF as well as some of the loudest cheers on Fourth Street.
But I realized that it isn’t just the length of the course itself that interests me but the way that the extreme distances invite me to pay attention to what I am doing, rather than how long it takes me to do it. No matter what distance you are training or racing, I invite you to adopt that approach and to take joy in the process every day, and not use the time elapsed as an excuse to steal your own joy by comparing yourself to anyone else — or even to yourself.