Growing Slow ls Mandatory

Growing up is optional.

change? In Chasing the Runner’s High, 1 wrote that all runners can be divided into four groups:

[): people ever really change? More to the point, do runners ever really

¢ New runners are still trying to figure it out. They often have doubts about whether they’re going to keep running, and some of them don’t.

¢ Fitness runners enjoy how running helps them stay healthy and build strength and stamina, but they’re casual about it.

¢ Racers are all about testing boundaries and keeping score. They set goals and make them a priority. Those goals are often about speed, but someone who is jogging through a marathon to collect another state or someone who can’t take a day off to let a minor injury heal might also be a racer.

¢ Mature runners have taken the final step. Running is still important to mature runners, but they don’t let running control their life.

When I first defined the groups, I saw them as a progression. I assumed that people who stuck with running evolved naturally from one stage to the next. That might have been wishful thinking. At the time, I thought of myself as a racer, as I imagine most Marathon & Beyond readers do. Continually striving to go farther or faster creates a lot of stress, both physical and mental. It was comforting to think that by just hanging around, I would inevitably mature as a runner and get better at managing that stress.

As I met more runners, my thoughts changed. Some people enjoy running for fitness without ever needing to test themselves. Others thrive on continual competition and manage to find enough of the success they crave to keep them straining against their limits. Some people even manage to stay in the beginner group, endlessly starting, quitting, and trying again. Time alone is not enough to move a runner on the path to maturity.

But I still believe that you have to move through one stage to get to the next and that for the richest experience, runners need to move through all four stages.

Taking the ultimate step

The most difficult step is the last: moving from racer to mature runner. Racers strive, and you can’t strive for the acceptance a mature runner needs. You have to embrace your limits, accept yourself, and enjoy what you can do instead of obsessing over what you can’t. Is that maturity, or just surrendering? Until you stop asking that question, you’ve got a ways to go.

Runners become racers when they discover that testing themselves helps fill a need, a need for competition, for success, for clear, concrete goals, or to escape. A need for something, whatever it might be, something that running gives them.

I was never fast enough to compete for the top prizes, but I learned to lose to other people with only minor amounts of jealousy. I certainly had enough practice.

Instead, I focused on competing with myself. I became addicted to the feeling I got when I achieved some new victory or stretched the boundaries of what I could do in some new way. My successes helped make me feel good about myself, but it was a never-ending cycle. I set goals, and if I met or exceeded them, there was always a faster time or a longer distance that I could strive for next.

We can all beat the clock, at least for a while, but no one beats the calendar. My goals were always expanding, so sometimes I would fail to reach them. Still, my old self was the one person I could always beat, sooner or later—until the day came when I couldn’t.

In the search for something
new, | tried the Josh Billings
RunAground.

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