The Question I Keep Avoiding

It was a Friday morning in 2023 when I laced up my running shoes with a particular determination in my heart. I’m not sure if it was good determination or the kind that creates a knot in your stomach and makes you feel slightly queasy.

I’d decided that morning was the day I would beat my personal record on a 2-mile run. I wasn’t training for anything. I always joke with my running buddies that I wouldn’t pay to enter a race when I can suffer for just the price of shoes.

This was one of those unspoken internal challenges that had grown too loud to ignore.

My friends and I have the prescribed routes we follow based on the day of the week, and they all start the same with a gradual slopes in the first mile and a short flat stretch after that to make up the first two miles. I walked for just a minute to warm up, watching the seconds slowly blink away on my watch before I hit start and sprinted like I was trying to catch a runaway car with a baby on board.

My legs were already complaining before I hit the half-mile mark. To “punish” them, I pushed harder. My lungs burned. The incline seemed somehow steeper than usual that day, and there’s a stop sign at the end of the first stretch that somehow seems to move farther away the faster you run.

I couldn’t afford to slow down. I checked my watch constantly. The first mile clicked by at just over seven minutes. It wasn’t fast enough, so I pushed even harder.

Thankfully, the second mile was flatter. My mind narrowed to a single objective: keep the pace in the sixes. Each footfall landed like a cannon in my ears. I could hear the sound of my heart beating. My head buzzed with adrenaline and reasons I couldn’t explain if you asked me about why this mattered so much.

At 1.9 miles, the road stretched longer than it ever had before. I forced a final sprint and crossed the 2-mile mark at 13 minutes and 58 seconds.

A personal best. By more than a minute. I tried to walk triumphantly, but the world started spinning. I dropped to my hands and knees on a concrete trail behind some beautiful homes in South Jordan and vomited.

That part wasn’t part of the plan.

That was only two years ago, but today my runs are much slower. In fact, sometimes they’re more walk than run. Recently, I went for a seven-mile run that took an hour and twenty-five minutes. I’m carrying 30 extra pounds. I came home, and the next day I was as sore as I used to be after a full marathon distance.

Things change so fast. I know I’m not the same kind of runner anymore. Honestly, I’m not even sure I want to be. I don’t need a personal record badly enough to throw up on the sidewalk again.

At the same time, though, there’s a part of me that still wants it. I still fight with the desire to have the same speed and the will to put in that kind of effort. That wow from someone else, even if it comes as a simple nod or a double-take at the numbers on my watch. I liked being the fast one in my little group of running friends. I liked having something to show. Even if no one asked me to prove anything, I proved it anyway.

Thinking about that, and so many other things, I realized I’ve been circling (avoiding, maybe) a question:

If I no longer have to prove anything to anyone, even myself, who am I willing to become?

I don’t have a nice, presentation-worthy answer.

Sometimes I still chase old records in former parts of my life. I still catch myself looking for external validation for something “cool” I’ve done. I still wrestle with the belief that impressive is the same as enough.

The older I get, though, the more I realize that what once felt like ambition sometimes doubles as self-aggression. When progress becomes a performance, it stops being progress. It becomes a mask I wear in misdirected motion.

I think I’m learning to move differently now.

I don’t check my watch every quarter mile. I don’t measure the worth of a morning by the pace it produced. The day before my recent seven-mile run, I “ran” six miles in an hour and forty-five minutes. I actually came home in the middle of the run to see if my wife wanted to go for a walk. She was still sleeping, so I took a nap (literally) then ran another two miles.
I got home and ate a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. There was nothing heroic about my run, but also, nothing hurt. More importantly, nothing ached to be seen.

Even by self-comparison, it was a lousy run from a time perspective. I could literally have walked the distance faster. But I got to watch the sunrise in St. George, Utah, which is beautiful in the Fall.

It was a different kind of record. One that doesn’t show up in splits or personal bests.

It’s hard to let go of old metrics. But it’s even harder to realize you were the one keeping score.

There’s peace in running for the sake of running. Writing for the sake of writing. Working for the sake of building something you believe in and not just to outrun what you fear might be true if you ever slow down.

I’m still learning to trust that.

And that is enough.