Three hours, three minutes and fifty-nine seconds.
My goal for the year was to break three hours in the Philadelphia Marathon last weekend, but I crossed the finish line four minutes too slow. Ten seconds faster per mile and I would have done it.
I’m disappointed because of how close I came to hitting a serious running milestone. A three hour marathon is nothing to sneeze at, and despite 3:03:59 feeling like a rounding error to the uninitiated, hardcore runners know the difference. You either break it, or you don’t. There’s no in between.
Despite the near-miss, I’m at peace with the result and have no intention of trying again next year. The race was the culmination of almost a year’s worth of effort, and obsessing over the milestone ignores all the good to come from the process itself: learning from failure in the Brooklyn Marathon, removing alcohol from my diet, setting a PR in the half marathon, and running faster and harder than I ever have before. As Gretchen Rubin says:
“What you do everyday matters more than what you do once in a while.”
All the work leading up to the marathon is far more important than the race itself.
If you had told me back in 2015 that I would eventually run a 3:03:59 marathon, or finish a 50-mile ultra, I would have said you were crazy. And I would have been right. I went for two short runs in college, and struggled through both of them.
But the beauty of this sport is that personal growth is inevitable. Running three miles was difficult until my body adapted – then six miles became the new high bar, then twelve, and then before I knew it I was running marathons.
After seven years, this is the most important gift that running has given me: The belief that my skills can be improved with persistent, everyday effort.
Looking back on my journey as a runner, it’s clear that the growth mindset I developed within the sport carried over to other areas of my life. For example, I have faith that I can improve as a writer because I have proof that I’ve improved as a runner. Without prior success elsewhere, bouts of writer’s block or self-doubt would be more difficult to get through.
Rather than a predetermined personality trait, it seems likely that a growth mindset is simply the result of experience. We believe our skills are fixed until we have proof that tells us otherwise. In that sense, a growth mindset is itself something that we grow into.
The challenge is overcoming that first hurdle. Choosing something you want to get better at and believing that you can do it. My path was through running, but there are countless other simple skills that can be cultivated with consistent hard work: weightlifting, public speaking, and learning a new language, to name a few.
As I learned in Philly, growth comes from the journey, not from success itself. Accepting this reality makes it easier to pursue difficult goals, because there is value in all outcomes.
The only thing that matters is putting in the work every day.
– Emmett
What I’m Reading:
One Day of Thanks Is Not Enough – Ryan Holiday
“This is part and parcel of living a life of amor fati. Where instead of fighting and resisting what happens to you, you accept it, you love it all. You’re grateful for it. No matter how tough it is.”
Magic Internet Money – Jack Raines
“Well, what is the real crypto? How much longer is this going to take? NASA was created in 1958, and we put a human being on the moon 11 years later. Bitcoin began circulating in 2009, and we can now do what? Buy a picture of a monkey for $500,000?”