The Race That Made Me Meditate
I’m so slow. Everyone is passing me. I suck.
These thoughts tormented me during every race in the spring of 2017. I loved the half and full marathon distances but I wanted to get better at racing short stuff too so I decided to make the spring a sort of racing bootcamp for myself by entering several races in the Denver/Boulder area.
My M.O. was to show up fit, fast, and overconfident, bolt from the start line at a pace too hot for me to handle, and die a slow death over the last third of the race. The longer the race, the more painful the death. Sometimes I eked out a decent result, at least winning my age group if not landing on the podium, but just as often I posted a colossal failure so absolute it was hard to identify any positives from the experience. One such race was the Running of the Green, a St. Patrick’s Day 7k in downtown Denver. The race is now held in much flatter, faster, and forgiving Washington Park, but the former course was hilly and more challenging than I’d anticipated. By the halfway point my speedy start relented to a crawl, and I started getting swallowed up by hordes of stronger and more patient runners. My posture sagged, and the negative chatter began.
I’m fat. I’m so out of shape. Why am I doing this?
Details like pace and overall place don’t matter as much as the feelings I can still conjure years later— a cocktail of equal parts disappointment, embarrassment, frustration, confusion, and the very real pain of running a 7k like a 5k. It wasn’t until sometime post-race that I realized two things. First, the dismal thoughts that overcrowded my brain made it impossible to succeed. Second, and more importantly, it hit me that my attempts to overpower the bully in my head failed every single time. It wasn’t that my negative thoughts were new, it was that I finally realized by not trying something different, I was letting them win.
At this point in my endurance career, I’d completed at least a dozen road marathons, a full-distance Ironman, and a 50-mile trail race. I’d taken my marathon PR from a respectable Boston Qualifying 3:31 to a “maybe I can qualify for the Olympic Trials” 2:48 in about 18 months. I started training with a group in Boulder, surrounding myself with people who had no problem kicking my ass as I worked hard to keep up. I wasn’t a beginner, but I was a novice at being competitive. My expectations grew quickly alongside my ego, both of which were fueled by training with actual elite runners. I was a hobby jogger who decided to see if I could be faster, and when I found myself among the leaders, my inner voice was always there to put me down and remind me that it was more comfortable to be in the middle of the pack.
All at once it hit me that if I couldn’t go from negative to positive, maybe I could at least go from negative to neutral. I didn’t need a cheerleader in my head; I needed calm. At the time, I didn’t know much about meditation except for the typical cliches, but I resolved to give it a shot. It took a bit of trial and error but I landed on one app, Headspace, that felt approachable and relevant. It stuck. I started meditating to improve my athletic performance but found meditation was applicable to other aspects of my life, helping me with pre-race jitters as much as managing conflict and grounding myself before a busy day.
A foundational principle of meditation is that a thought is just a thought, nothing more. If you can realize you’re having a thought, which itself takes practice, the next step is to provide a bit of distance and recognize its temporary presence before another thought pops in. Say hello to that one, and yet another appears. The real practice is not eliminating thoughts, but remaining curious yet detached, like you’re an outsider observing them—not a punching bag getting jabbed by each new fist heading your way.
In his book Elite Minds, author and sport psychologist Stan Beecham asks the reader to identify beliefs about oneself and follows that by prodding them to consider where that belief came from. The sad truth is that most of us don’t even realize what we believe about ourselves. In some ways we are each handed our identity, adopting thoughts, words, and habits that we mistook as facts, likely at a young age, from parents, coaches, teachers, siblings, and the world around us. These beliefs can become the soundtrack that plays on repeat for the rest of our lives. Meditation gives us the ability to distance ourselves from this noise, hit pause on the background music, and see it for what it is: nothing but thoughts that we can watch meander in and, if they don’t serve us anymore, we can eventually watch them fade away.
This is hard work that is best done in quiet moments with gentle patience, so it was no wonder I wasn’t making progress. I was trying to override a decades-old belief system while my heart was about to explode and my quads were on fire. Doing a few races in quick succession that spring made it impossible to ignore my self-limiting soundtrack, and motivated me to do the work required outside of racing so that I could give myself a shot at being successful out on the course. I can’t say that a self-deprecating thought has never entered my mind during a race since then, but now instead of going down a rabbit hole of negativity, I can more quickly recognize the thought for what it is (just a thought!) and recenter myself with a deep breath or mantra. Good practice for racing. Good practice for life.