Three months ago a new friend at a wedding asked me:
You’re a runner right, what’s your 5k time? Like under 20? 19 minutes? 18?!“
I slyly replied, knowing it would provoke a big reaction.
Ah, the last one I ran was like 15:40 something.
It did indeed provoke a big reaction. So much so that the next day, after a few drinks, he came to me and said “I’ve been telling everyone at this wedding how fast you are“, which is hilarious. It was half a joke but half real.
It then came up that there’s a 5k in December that he and a few others in our friend group are running, and maybe Meghan and I should come up to Brooklyn (where they live) to visit for a weekend and run the 5k. We agreed. A few of us in the group followed each other on Strava and said see ya in December.
At that point in time I was barely training; like 10 miles a week. Needless to say, after that weekend, I started training seriously again with no other race planned aside from this 5k.
The point of this post is examining WHY I started training.
When I trained for the marathon this past winter, I did it 99% because I wanted to see how fast I could run a marathon.
But this time, the reason is NOT because I want to run a fast 5k. Instead it’s 99% to impress these people and live up to the expectation that has been set from the wedding. These are Meghan’s college friends who I’ve met 5-10 times each. They loosely know that I run but not much more. If I kept at 10 miles a week, I could crank out an 18:00, get 10th place, and they would think “okay, pretty fast“. But egotistically, that’s not the impression I want.
So I trained pretty hard. Not 10/10 Eugene Marathon hard, but probably 7/10 hard. I expect something like 16:15 – 16:30 and hopefully a top 3 finish, maybe even win the thing (it’s going to be 26 degrees so who knows). Selfishly, that is the impression I want these people to have. That I’m really fast.
And I guess the point of this post is simply to put that in writing, that there is no ulterior motive.
There’s a tendency to say “who cares what others think of you!“, and to a large extent I agree with that! But everyone feels that external pressure sometimes. Is it a sign of true enlightenment if I don’t feel that? If I looked at this race and said “You know it doesn’t matter if these people think I’m fast”, would that show maturity?
In one sense, probably. I’m acting like this whole friend group will be talking about me in hushed tones going “whoa did you see what Sam ran?!“, when in reality, they’ll see the result and say cool that guy’s run his whole life I’d hope he’s fast who cares. There has to be some Freud or Nietzsche on this.
On the other hand, it’s a good thing that this motivation only got me to a 7/10, and the internal motivation for Eugene got me to a 10/10. That shows that I’m primarily motivated within, but outside influence can exist.
Perhaps I’ll look back in 10-20 years and feel enlightened and laugh at how conceited I am. But today, right now, at 33, what can I say, I still care.
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