Chopping Heads
Pinning on a number and running a PR is satisfying, but sometimes it’s the training PR’s that stick with you
My roommate was feeling dejected. It was a Saturday and he’d just asked a girl he liked if she would go out with him the following Friday. She told him she was busy. What’s more, she was ‘busy’ the whole weekend, the whole following week, and — now she came to think of it — the week after as well.
We agreed that this was an unlikely start to a relationship, and he seemed a little down. I wasn’t too worried about him — romantic rejection was one of the many life lessons we were learning at college — but perhaps I should have been.
The next morning we ran together. For 20 miles I hung on to his heels; looking back, it was the hardest long run of my life. Afterwards he said that he felt no pain, ‘only the aching of my heart’. Trying to hold on, I was ready to let him go by the time we flipped it around at the halfway mark. Each of the next 10 miles felt like the last mile of a 10k, and all in all, it was harder than any race I ran that season. It was also a ton of fun: we loved our Sunday long run, and we always ran fast, but this was the fastest we’d ever been. To this day, I’ve never run faster, and it’s probably my favorite PR over any distance.
For the point of that story, let’s backtrack a little. When I was just beginning to take running seriously, my coach would tell me about the Hydra, that serpentine monster fought by a Greek guy a while back. The difficult thing about battling the Hydra was that it had a lot of heads, and every time you cut off a head, two or three more would grow back in it’s place. To defeat the thing, you had to cut off all the heads (it was known that attacking the body wasn’t allowed… only a coward would do that): but since the heads always grew back, a hero could battle this thing for eternity and not really get anywhere. When I remarked upon the futility of such an endeavor, my coach winked, and said: “Not if you love chopping heads”.
I would eventually understand all too well what he meant. Like every other runner I’ve met, I’ve only ever wanted to be better: better than the guy next to me, yes, but mainly just better — better than I am now, better than I was, better than I will be at some point in the future when age catches up with me. It’s in our nature to never be satisfied. A compliment to a runner after a race is rarely well received… “Oh, thanks, but I should have got that guy at the end”… “It was alright, but I shouldn’t have let them drop me”… “I won, yeah, but it wasn’t a PR”. Even after a PR performance, it isn’t long before there’s a new and loftier goal, a faster time that needs to be beaten. Ambition plagues every runner, frustrates them no end, but somehow feels like the most meaningful thing in the world. There’s no better feeling than getting better, and the personal record represents our former best. We love that number, and we hate it: every runner has those digits engraved on their heart — all the way down to two decimal places.
At times, the process is wonderful. I don’t need to tell anyone that setting a PR feels awesome. Sometimes, though, you can go years without one. If that’s happened to you, I don’t need to tell you how terrible that can be. What I can do, however, is to simply add my voice to the chorus that has (hopefully) been telling you to enjoy the process. They say that if you enjoy your job, you’ll never work a day in your life. The same is true of running. Whether you’re at peak fitness or clawing back from an injury, take time to enjoy the incremental achievements: whether it’s lifting a little more, stretching a little longer, or running some workout a little faster.
As much as any race, I remember that long run. I also remember my best 400m workout, and my benchpress max, and that time I did 33 chin-ups. I would actually argue it was 34, but some people are picky. I remember these things because I was happy when they happened, but also because I’m going to be happy when I beat them. It’s going to take a lot of work, but it’ll be awesome to see the marks fall, and maybe, by happy coincidence, chasing these marks will help me take down my 5k PR. That one has been sitting there looking at me for too long.
From now until until August 31, if you run a PR in Tracksmith apparel, Tracksmith will pay you a $250 PR Bonus in the form of store credit — all you need to do is run a race of 800m or more and record a time faster than you’ve ever run before. Easy, right? You can find out all the details on the PR Bonus at Tracksmith.com.
