If we walk down to start of any cross-country race, and asked every runner if they would like to win or not, you’d probably get a similar answer from each athlete on the line:
“Well, sure I’d like to win. If you’re asking me. If you are giving me a choice. Why not?”
The question I’d then like to have answered is…what was that athlete doing on hot days in July?
Because winning on race day requires preparation, not just trying hard on race day. Not just wishing for results.
Everyone can get excited about the prospect of a great result:
- Winning a race.
- Being accepted to Stanford.
- Publishing a novel.
- Building a company.
But not everyone has the persistence to do what is necessary:
- Running thousands of miles over a period of years.
- Pursuing good grades every semester of high school, building a portfolio of extracurricular accomplishments, developing a great application package.
- Writing and re-writing and facing rejection before the book is published.
- Years and years of work, sacrificing vacations, facing skepticism from others, taking risks/accepting the probability of failure.
Passion is common…endurance is rare. ~Angela Duckworth
What Dr. Duckworth means is, it’s easy to get excited about the thought of incredible success…many people get excited about the idea of a win. What is uncommon, what is rare, is the persistence and the endurance to continue to pursue the goal. Most people give up when the pursuit of success becomes difficult or uncomfortable, or in the face of the first setback. ‘I didn’t want to go to Stanford anyway.’ ‘Getting a novel published is not really that important, I can write a blog.’ ‘Venture capital is so political, it’s a rigged game, who cares.’
Being successful at distance running requires both physical endurance, but more importantly, mental endurance. Successful distance running demands that we get ourselves out there on that hot July day when we really don’t feel like running, and then asks us to do that again the next day. That’s one of the reasons I absolutely love distance running for high school students–athletes have the opportunity to develop their mental endurance while preparing for the cross-country season. Not many of us will make a career of cross-country running–but the mental endurance that we develop while running in high school will help us throughout our lives, whether we decide to write a novel, or build a company, or become a doctor…or whatever we decide to pursue.
While looking ahead to those starting lines in September and October and November…when you ask yourself ‘do I want to win today?’ the question is not about necessarily being the first one across the line. There might be 250 runners in your race; there is more than one winner and one way to win. If you know that you worked as hard as you could to prepare for your season and your race, and you put your best effort into your race…you will probably PR…and in my book, you win.
Winning requires more than hard effort on one day, or one week. Winning requires long term effort (whatever winning means for you, not just winning the race, but a PR, or feeling great and satisfied, whatever means success for you).
Keep this in mind when you are thinking about getting out the door to run. Getting out the door is the hardest part. You can do it!
Good luck with your training! See you next month!
