How a Long-Term Perspective Is Helping Me Stay Grounded
This day, this moment, is just one in a big puzzle.
The other day, I was on a morning run trying to run somewhere between nine to ten miles. Early on in the run, I felt pretty bad. I had just run a pretty hard 12-mile race the weekend before, and I felt tired and sluggish physically the couple days before. I looked at my watch each mile and was clicking off some, for me, pretty slow miles. I looked at the pace each mile — my usual easy run pace on a day I don’t feel terrible is anywhere from 7 minutes per mile to 7:45 pace per mile.
This happened until about five and a half miles, where I clicked off 8:30 and 8:15 miles. Again, I didn’t stress too much about it because I felt super sluggish. I looked then changed my view on the watch. Instead of showing how long I had been running every mile, I shifted the screen on my GPS watch to the one that showed the total time I’d been running.
It wasn’t instant, but over the course of that mile, I got a lot more optimistic. I’d been running for almost 40 minutes at that point. I’d put in a lot of work over the course of that run, that week. The momentarily feeling of sluggishness at 6 a.m. on a Wednesday morning was only temporary, and the momentum I gained from seeing the runs in a more long-term manner rather than how fast…
