Jog On: The Three Things I Learned From Being In The Bottom 5%.
Parkruns are free Saturday morning weekly 5k running events at a local community level. They are ran all over the world. I’ve only ever done a handful of them — in various places across the UK — and they have always been an entirely positive, wholesome experience.
The other day I participated in my local Parkrun after an absence of two years or so. I finished 634th. That put me firmly in the bottom 5%.
Rather than hang my head in proverbial shame, drag myself back home, and do my usual go-to and eat my feelings, I wanted to write a little about the three ways I contextualized this to be useful to me going forward.
It’s entirely possible that your eyes will be rendered sore through how much they’ve been rolling as you read on, thinking of this as nothing more than a vain attempt at some random on the Internet trying to make themselves feel better with platitudes and truisms by masquerading their ramblings as some kind of faux-productivity blog post that’s as inspirational as a cold, wet flannel.
Maybe that’s true.
Or maybe it’s not. Maybe you’re someone reading this who is struggling to make progress at something — anything — and like me there are certain things in your life where you repeatedly find yourself in a volatile stop-start cycle of disappointment and determination.
If you’re the latter: chin up and read on. I don’t have all the answers but I do believe it’s in the act of mentally unpacking and articulating these things — of contextualizing them to establish clarity — that’s going to play a significant role in helping me. Maybe it will help you too.
1. It’s not really the bottom 5% of anything.
If I think about this in context and how I’ve automatically framed it in my head simply by writing “the bottom 5%”, I ask myself is that really true?
Yes, I was in the bottom 5% of those who finished the Parkrun in my hometown on that day. Yes, I finished 634th.
- What if it was out of a million?
- Or out of the 650 fastest runners in the world?
- How about other Cities? Counties? Countries? Species?!
- Other points in history?
- Individuals who couldn’t run even they wanted to?
- Individuals who aren’t in the privileged position to take a Saturday morning off to go for a run?
- Individuals who are in that position but chose not to attend?
I also got notified I was in the top 30 for my age group. When framed that way, it sounds a lot better than finishing 634th, right? But does that mean I actually performed any better? Are there less people in my age group participating, or are they just slower than me?
When I think about any kind of stats in this context, the bottom x% of anything doesn’t really mean a lot and is entirely dependent on the way in which you’re thinking about it.
2. I’m running against myself, not others.
Let’s say a finishing time of 40:00 is what earned me that illustrious 634th place. If I had ran a 5k in half of that time but still earned 634th place, does that mean I’ve not improved?
Absolutely not!
Focusing on how “well” others are doing relative to me will only act as a recipe for a feeling of inadequacy (or at the other end of the spectrum, inflate my ego). Neither are genuine perspectives I particularly want to engage with.
I instead focus on whether I’m improving relative to my past efforts and not relative to the efforts of other people today.
3. Running doesn’t have to be a race.
I can go a step further and even question my second point above. Am I even racing myself? Is this even a race in the traditional sense of the word? Is improvement in finishing time the metric from which I should gauge success?
It’s competitive if I make it competitive. My perspective is shifting towards instead just finding the instrinsic value in the simple joy of putting one foot in front of the other. In the moment it’s not a marathon or a sprint. It’s putting one foot in front of the other. A lot. Who cares if I’m first, last or even consistent?
Conclusion
Zooming out to take a step back, these are things that extend beyond Parkrun. If I think about this in the context of my work as a video game composer, I ask myself the same questions:
- How do I define, contextualise and frame success for myself?
- Is each action I take conducive to that success in some way?
- Am I continuing to feel more creatively satisfied with each new composition?
- Am I focusing on the intrinsic value I find in the act of composing?
Thanks for reading!
