Under Pressure & Getting Real
This time next week, I'll have -- hopefully! -- finished the Pittsburgh Half Marathon, and I'm feeling a maelstrom of emotions as I enter the final week of preparation. Last weekend I wrote an entire post -- but never posted it, obviously -- proudly proclaiming how psyched I was for the race after feeling so nervous about fully committing to it over the preceding weeks, nervous to post about it online, nervous to book my ticket home, nervous to ask for donations -- I'm running for charity, more on that later -- nervous to fulfill the very purpose I started this blog for -- to share my running journey in a way that I hope will inspire people, inspire me, and hold myself accountable and keep myself on track to set and reach my goals this year. It turns out my fear of failure is so deep-rooted that even with a race of almost guaranteed success (this is my second half marathon, after all -- I know my body and mind can handle it) I've still been freaking out over the last month ever since I signed up and started training for the race. Now, a week later, as I realize those same fears kept me from posting a "I'm no longer afraid!" post, I'm trying to stay honest and come to terms with the fact that these fears and doubts don't magically go away. In retrospect, I wish I had been honest about this all along, because as I chronicle my journey and relationship with running here, I want to capture the whole truth, the lows with the highs, because I want to remind myself -- and whoever else is out there reading -- that just because you feel really miserable after a run doesn't mean you should stop running, that just because you're pretty sure you haven't trained enough and that you're not going to set a personal record doesn't mean you shouldn't still run a race, that just because you don't always love running and because running doesn't always make you feel good about yourself, it doesn't mean you're not a "real" runner. I think it's important to acknowledge that the journey isn't just a point A to point B trajectory -- it's not like you get off the couch and just *poof!* become a marathoner. If the couch is point A, the marathon is point Z, and there's a hell of a lot that happens in between. There are lots of really amazing, affirming moments in the journey -- setting personal time and distance records, getting a medal at the end of your first race, encouragement from your friends when you share your little triumphs, convincing yourself to get out of bed for a short morning run -- but there are also difficulties, and that's kind of the point of the whole journey. Sure, you hope that one day running one mile stops being difficult, but as soon as it does, you set a new goal and try running two miles and it's difficult all over again, and that's the point. When you get down to it, I think the spirit of running -- as a sport, a job, a hobby, whatever -- is to do something difficult, and to do it even though you know it's difficult; that just because something is hard, doesn't mean it's impossible.
One of the reasons that my trepidation over this race has been compounding into such a debilitating anxiety about accountability is that each day I feel nervous, a sense of shame in me grows and grows -- shame for not posting yesterday, the day before, the day before that. Shame for not emailing my family to share the "exciting" news and ask for their support raising money for charity last week, or the week before that, or the week before that. Shame that I've skimped on my training plan, shame that I didn't book my ticket home until yesterday, shame that I won't live up to the expectations I've set for myself, and fear that if I tell everyone else what I want to do -- finish a half marathon and raise $500 for Girls on the Run -- then I'll just have more reasons to feel ashamed if I fail. With each week that I fall short of the training plan, each day I procrastinate contacting my family or updating my blog, a little voice in my head whispers to me that I'm going to mess up the race too, I'm going to fall short, I'm not going to complete it, I'm going to get injured, I'm going to run embarrassingly slow, I'm not going to meet my fundraising goals and I'll be a failure and an embarrassment, not just to myself, but to everyone who I roped into supporting me along the way.
Some days the struggle is physical -- heaving lungs, burning calves, aching feet -- and some days it's mental -- feelings of doubt, inadequacy, fear. As I go into this race, I have a feeling it'll be both for me. I know I haven't trained as much as would have been ideal, I know my knees are a little shaky, my shoes a liiiiitle too worn in, my calves prone to cramps, my joints aching after each long run, but I also know that I'm healthy and injury-free, that I've been logging long runs with pacing not far off from my goal, and my body is strong enough to finish 13 miles even if it is completely spent afterwards. I know that I also haven't been mentally preparing for this the way I'd hoped, as evidenced by my last-minute travel plans, down-to-the-wire fundraising pleas, and, well, the entire mental mess this whole post is about. But I'm going to run this race anyway. This voice in my head is trying to tell me that, because this all feels difficult, that means I'm doing something wrong. It's trying to tell me that if I'd really prepared, I wouldn't feel this nervous. That if I'd really trained, I wouldn't have felt miserable on mile 9 of a 13 mile run yesterday. That I'm going into this all wrong, and since I'm not going into it perfect, it's not worth doing. Well, sorry not sorry, Voice In My Head, but I'm not buying what you're selling.
Running a half marathon is not supposed to be easy, mentally or physically, and the fact that I'm kind of freaked out about it is -- are you ready for this? -- completely normal. As much as I felt prepared and excited (and not under pressure) for my first half marathon, if I'm being honest with myself, I got pretty freaked the week before that one too! I was nervous about rebounding from injuries, nervous about whether I'd make my time goals, nervous about the weather, nervous about pacing, and nervous about my focus since I was nervous about so many things! But I still ran that race, I dialed my goals down, picked one focus -- finish this race -- and as I ran, I listened to my body, went slow when I needed to, faster when I wanted to, and kept running -- without setting an ultimatum or forcing myself to -- even when I wanted to stop and walk, and whenever I started worrying about my time, I just told myself to give it my best, give it my all, and when I finished well within my initial goal time (under 3 hours), and just shy of my wouldn't-it-be-cool-if-I-pulled-this-off reach goal of 2.5 hours, I felt incredible, not because of my time, but because I knew I had met the most important goals -- I had done the absolute best I could do, and I had given my all and not held back, even though I was cold and exhausted. The triumph wasn't that I'd turned something hard into something easy; it was that I achieved something difficult, and if it'd been easy, it wouldn't have felt the same.
As much as I love to talk about the little triumphs of running -- because I think it's important to know, when you're struggling to run a mile without stopping, just how amazing it feels when you finally do! -- sometimes the triumphs have a way of tricking me into thinking that it should always feel like this, and that if it doesn't, it means there's something wrong. I'm learning, though, trying to learn at least, that that's not true. At all. Like I said, it's supposed to be hard. We're supposed to be challenging ourselves. Yesterday I went on my final long training run, 13 miles, and around mile 7, I was elated. I was in the zone, feeling great, and so proud of myself that 7 miles was now a distance that I could file under "easy." I mean, wow! Just over a year ago, I had never run more than 4 miles, and even that distance usually made me feel sick and exhausted for the rest of the day. So to be feeling energized over halfway through a long run was a pretty huge deal! But then around mile 9, I crashed. I'd been fueling and hydrating like I normally did on long runs, but something happened around that 9th mile and all of a sudden I just wanted to stop, I couldn't see how I could possibly finish the run. I'd already ran through calf cramps in the first few miles and my body had felt fine for the rest of the run, but now I could feel every step in my joints, by feet hurt, by lower back ached, I could feel a small discomfort in my knees that begged some focused examination of my form. No amount of power bar, banana, or Gatorade made me feel any better. No awesome classic rock song motivated me to pick up the pace. Had I been running loops around my neighborhood, I'd probably have gone home, but I was stranded on the west side of Manhattan and had to cross the entire island, get to the Williamsburg bridge and over into Brooklyn before getting home. There was literally no way to cut my run short; I had to keep going. It was tough. I stopped to walk way more than I wanted to. My body hurt, I was tired, but there was no other option than to keep going. I tried to focus, but there were still these nagging doubts, these little knives of shame piercing me with thoughts that I had failed, I must have gone too fast or not fueled properly, that I should have broken in my new shoes more before such a long run, that there must be something wrong with my form, that I Was A Failure for feeling good at 7 miles and terrible at 9 miles. And for those last 4 miles, feeling good a 7 miles no longer felt like a triumph, it felt like a failure. It felt like it was more important to feel good at 9 miles than to feel good at 7, and since I had gotten it backwards, I'd messed up. And since this was my last long run before the race, it meant I'd not only messed up my whole training schedule, but that I'd probably mess up on race day too. And I'd messed up by not messing up before, on an earlier run, because now I didn't have time or another long run to figure out what went wrong and fix it.
When I finally finished the run and wanted nothing more than to just lie down on the sidewalk right there. The 1-mile cool-down walk afterwards was pure misery. But what I'm realizing today, on the other side of it, is that that's okay. Sure, I can definitely learn from yesterday's run, and maybe it wouldn't hurt to pace myself a bit more and to fuel a bit more, but it is not, in any way, shape or form, some kind of failure just because it was difficult. What I'm trying to get at, what I'm trying to hammer into my head in the week before race day, is that difficulty does NOT equal failure, and that maybe it actually is more related to success. It means that I'm pushing myself. I'm pushing my body -- as evidenced in my tired joints and stiff muscles -- and I'm pushing my mind too -- evident in the epic struggle it's putting up to interpret all this, the upsurge of shame and anxiety in an area of my life that usually helps me cope with those feelings rather than create them. My mind and body are struggling to do this, but they are doing it, and ultimately I think that's maybe exactly where I want to be at this point. I want the goals I set for myself to be hard, but not impossible. I want to recognize that point Z -- the marathon -- is a long way off, is difficult, is Not Something I Can Do Right Now, but that experience has taught me that it is Something I Can Do in the future, with the right training and preparation, and that the goals that are the most difficult are the ones that feel the most amazing when you reach them.
I like thinking of the marathon as my point Z -- it's the 26th letter of the alphabet, after all, which fits perfectly with this blog and our goal of running 26(.2!) miles by the end of our 26th year. It also helps to look at that far-off, abstract goal and to realize that if I can have the faith in myself to do that -- and I do -- then I can have the faith in myself to complete the leg of the journey I'm in right now. This half marathon is going to be hard for me, but I'm still going to do it. And whatever happens, whether I walk half the race or set a personal record, I will be stronger at the finish line than I was before, I'll be on the other side of my goal to run another half marathon, and I'll be 13.1 miles closer to running a marathon.
A note about this post: ever since I was a youngster, back in the LiveJournal days, I've always fought with a compulsion to only share positive things online, and to feel guilty when I share something less-than-stellar. As a teen, I'd post some rant, and then follow it up 2 hours later with an apology about being negative, or cover it up with a bunch of light-hearted quizzes, or even take the post down. I don't want to do that here because, like I said, I think it's important to be honest with myself and others. Especially when I think about sharing my journey with other people, I think it's unfair, misleading, and irresponsible to only share the good things. I think it's important to acknowledge the struggles, if only for the sake of honesty, but also so that when we do struggle, we know that it's normal, and that we're not alone, and that we don't need to feel ashamed of struggling. The struggles are hard enough without compounded feelings of shame and inadequacy, fear and doubt. I know that there are plenty of runners who don't deal with this, or do and don't talk about it, but it's something that I want to own and be totally honest about because I know that there are plenty of people who can and do relate, and it does them -- and me -- a disservice to cover up both our struggles and our triumphs over those struggles. When my friends congratulate me for finishing my half marathon next week, I want them to know what a struggle it was for me and what it meant for me. I don't want someone who's just starting out running to think that this was no big deal for me, and that they could never do it because it does seem like a big deal to them. The friends who have inspired me to take up distance running are not the ones who've been running cross-country since they were 15 (though I have mad respect for those who have!!), but the ones who run slow like me, the ones who struggled to run 2 miles, the ones who were not "runners," who didn't go to the gym, who were not tall skinny athletic bean poles, but who set a goal and achieved it anyway. When I looked at people who were already avid runners and racers, I couldn't see how I could possibly get from where I was to where they were; I felt like they just had something that I inherently lacked. But when I looked at my "non-runner" friends, I saw myself, and I figured that if they could do it, I could do it too.
If this is something that speaks to you at all, I'd encourage you to consider making a donation to or getting involved in Girls on the Run, the charity that I'm running for in the Pittsburgh Half Marathon. Girls on the Run empowers young girls and teens, ages 8-13, to be joyful, healthy and confident through a character development program that teaches girls about reaching goals, overcoming challenges, and building confidence and self-esteem. At the end of the program, all of the girls complete a 5k fun run (to give you some context, I didn't run my first 5k until I was 20 -- an 8-year-old doing the same is wildly impressive!)
I'm running for the Pittsburgh chapter of GOTR, which is committed to providing programming to all interested girls, regardless of their families' income. You can help support the over 60% of participants who receive scholarships by making a donation through my fundraising page through April 30, 2014. Every donation, regardless of size, is a huge help and greatly appreciated! If you would like to get involved in your local chapter as a coach, volunteer, or running buddy, check out the Girls on the Run homepage to find the program closest to you. Thanks for paying it forward!
