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Tempering

Tempering

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More often than not, I tend to ramble on about The Process — capitalization for emphasis, clearly — with marathon training and the inherent joy and challenge of going through it and coming out on the other side. The Process, the grind, the daily showing up when you don’t always feel like it for whatever real or perceived reason, is part of how we grow as athletes and as human beings. It’s that whole “if it were easy, everyone would be doing it” thing. 

Knowing all that, I tend to hold tight to the value of fairly low expectations for myself. I may have a very vague idea of what I could possibly do on any given day, but it’s exceedingly rare that I go into a race, a workout, or even just a plain ol’ training run with an abundance of confidence about what’s going to happen. Will I fail spectacularly? Will this all go over without a hitch? No idea either way. Won’t know unless (and until) I try. 

That’s a good enough reason, most of the time, to get me out the door to see what’s possible.

I was thinking about all this stuff recently, after my eldest’s swim meet over the weekend and after reading this article from Matt Fitzgerald about his upcoming 100k. I can’t pretend to know what must be running through Matt’s head as he attempts his longest race ever, with a lot of extenuating circumstances that hamstrung his training and his ability to have a minimal-suffering race. His attitude is awesome though — show up, be there for it, and just see how it goes — and this characteristic is one that I’ve been trying mightily to foster in my own approach to my training. 

My eldest’s meet over the weekend also got me thinking about this stuff because she raced very well for her with what I’m pretty sure were fairly non-existent expectations. Of late, she has been drawn to the 500 (500!!) freestyle and has been racing it as often as it’s available in competition; they also fairly routinely do it during practice each week, too. She had been sitting at a certain time for the past 3 or 4 attempts, plus or minus a couple seconds, and she seemed really satisfied by it and happy with the consistent effort she had been putting out. On Sunday though, she took off a solid 20 seconds from her time — 20 seconds! — and when I told her her finish time after she hit the wall (the wall is good to hit in swimming…not so much in running, I know), she was FLOORED, so happy she was nearly in tears. She probably never thought she could do that, or make that huge a jump … until she did. 

radiating joy

As her mom and as an athlete, it was such a joy to witness her realization firsthand.

It is comparably joyful to see how she has become attuned to the beauty of The Process and to watch it unfold night after night at practice and week after week at meets. 

Tempering our high-achieving standards for ourselves with a heaping dose of humble pie, and who knows what will happen? It may not be so bad.

It may, in fact, be far sweeter than we could have imagined. 

Blips in time

Blips in time

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As much as I love marathon training and racing this distance, I’ll be the first to admit that much of the time, it’s a lot of minutiae. Yes, it’s one sport — running — but I’ll concede that you can cut it a thousand different ways; I’m talking long runs, speed workouts, tempo runs, fartleks, LSD runs, trails, hill repeats, you get the idea. 

It’s the same activity, just done … differently, kinda.  

Even though we have such a huge variety of “types” of running at our fingertips when we’re in the thick of training, it’s easy to get bogged down in it, in the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other, hundreds of thousands of times, while we propel ourselves in a generally-speaking forward direction. 

in the thick of it with J at my side (praise be) (PC: J)

That said, even when the tedium of training can be mind-numbing, I’m a firm believer that it confers so many other beneficial, transferable skills that the good stuff far outweighs the bad. Of course, I’m talking about the immeasurable value of consistency, showing up, learning how to listen to our bodies (which sometimes is on its own separate page from our minds), gritting our teeth and grinding when the time is right, and rinsing and repeating day after day, week after week. 

When I’m in the thick of it, I find it immensely helpful to remember that the process is the beauty and the beauty is the process. 

Keep the thing The Thing. 

Even when the minutiae swells deep, remembering to zoom out and acknowledge that this training cycle — this training run — is part of the larger narrative unwinding as I’m living it. 

keeping the thing The Thing (PC: J)

It’s nothing but a blip of time in the long haul, and learning this — and accepting this — has been remarkably freeing. No longer do all my eggs go in one basket each week or in each training cycle. 

It’s all part of the longer trajectory. 

Marathon training also confers to me the rather convenient side benefit of quantifying (or qualifying) my life in several weeks- or months-long cycles, the end of which is marked by the final, culminating race (or races, plural, as it sometimes is). When a particular cycle concludes, once I complete the race — regardless of how my performance fared on the day — I have a better barometer by which I can measure whatever it is what I want to measure. 

What does this mean? Surely the obvious stuff — how many miles I ran in that cycle, my total elevation gain over the last couple months, how fast I ran on The Big Day — but also the less-obvious stuff, too — how much over the past X number of weeks or months did I show up when it all kinda sucked? How often did I give up when training got hard? How successful was I at controlling my attitude and my effort? When I was positive that it couldn’t be done, did I actually go and do it? I find all of this tremendously valuable and again, so deeply transferable to other aspects of my life. 

I purposely don’t talk much in this space about my non-running life, but the transferability of lessons learned while training to parenting, especially, roll deep. Ask any parent, whose child is any age under the sun, and they’ll all tell you how fast time seems to go, how frenetic the pace is once children reach a certain age (and certainly once they begin attending school). 

so big

Like training, in parenting, it’s so, so easy to get bogged down (and some days, to feel altogether trapped) by the minutiae and the tedium, and here again, I have found that remembering that right now — regardless of the severity (and impressive scale!) of tantrum your child just threw, the untold number of diapers or spit-up-upon shirts or shorts you’ve changed, whatever the case may be — it’s all fleeting. 

It’s all blips in time. 

first time for everything

In parenting as in with training, taken together, all those little blips in totality can create something more profound and deeply awe-inspiring than we could have ever imagined. 

Being there for it — witnessing it, helping it along day after day, nurturing it to come into its own — is such an incredible gift and a privilege for which I am so deeply and humbly grateful. 

xo

The process is the beauty. 

The beauty is the process.