[I wrote the first part of this blog in June and it’s been caramelizing on the back burner since:]
Once, when I was about twelve, my dad casually mentioned that he had finished sixth in the Milwaukee City Conference Swim meet in high school. For the hundred yard freestyle. I might have been riding shotgun in our rusted out ’92 Toyota pickup (the “Swamp Wagon”) at the time, getting picked up from my own recreation team swim practice. I’m not really sure. What I do remember is being plowed over by the fact that my dad had been, at one time, the sixth best swimmer in Milwaukee, that seemingly huge, sprawling metropolis that covered my entire world as a seventh grader. This is how I interpreted it: my father was better than everyone I saw around me at swimming.
Later, in high school, running came along and started zooming my view out. Way out. Within a couple years after falling in love with running at age fourteen I was trading my microscopic lens for a telescopic mirror, expanding the boundaries of what I knew and thought possible. Winning at the city conference level was sweet but quickly became not quite good enough. I finished runner up at the Wisconsin state level, was disappointed, and wanted more. On to college and then professional running.
You don’t stop until you get stopped. Your perspective keeps growing larger, newly spawned and swimming with the current into larger and larger creeks and streams and rivers and bays until, if you stay in what you’re doing long enough, you find the sea.
The sea is where it gets hard as shit to improve. At running and any pursuit in life. You’re not really sure if maybe you’re in the Gulf of Mexico or the Mediterranean or perhaps the South China Sea where there’s still another larger body of water to get to, another higher level of running. You kind of just have to keep training and racing and grinding and believing, knowing rationally that you simply may never get better again, that you’re already in the huge ocean, that you’ve reached your potential.
That’s what any challenging pursuit comes down to when you’ve been doing it for a long time: facing the other way while you throw resources into a game that, on paper, is ultimately stacked against you. You’ve reaped the early, easy dividends and now every scrap of success comes with ever increasing difficulty. To me (and I’m sure others) the professional running circuit can seem a ruthless landscape over which your fitness is draped, bared to world class competition in nearly every race. You put your ego and, perhaps unhealthily, your perception of yourself on the line every time. There is no hiding. Everyone sees your result. If it sounds like gambling, it sort of is.
In June walked away disgusted and distraught from the US 5,000m championship race with a fourteenth place finish. It had been yet another track season spent performing at more or less the same level as the last five years. I felt like I was caught in a real life cycle of Deja Vu, spinning my wheels and going nowhere towards the big goals I set out to achieve when I left college. Many people would have given it up long ago, and I don’t say that to sound tough or persistent. A lot of the time, continuing to run feels like insanity. Especially when there’s American society like a parrot on my shoulder, silently screaming at me to quit this very unusual pursuit and lead a normal life. Yet something keeps me in it.
I remember the awe I felt as a twelve year old at my dad being the sixth best high school swimmer our medium size city. Twelve year old Joe would have freaked out if he knew that sixteen years down the road he’d be fourteenth in the country at something. It’s tempting to let a disappointing race kill my enjoyment and love of running, especially when the disappointment now feels cyclical, happening again and again. But the memory with dad grounds me. I feel the bile of failure most when I compare myself to the best-ever version of me (the BEST races I've run, the PRs).
It feels a hell of a lot better to instead compare myself to an earlier time, when I only dreamt of where I am now.
It’s not against the rules to create your own personal definition of success. Crucially, one that rewards you even when other’s calculation of success doesn’t. Sticking your fingers in your ears and reflecting inwardly is more important today than perhaps ever. There’s a lot of noise in both the real world and realm of social media to filter through. (Some of the past Olympians who come to speak at Zap running camps in the summer admit they might not have been able to maintain the iron will of their heyday in the current age. Too much awareness of everyone else’s training and mentality can be a negative distraction.)
My personal metric for success is simply this:
Success is accomplishing a thing you once, at any point in your life, thought was undoable or impossible.
Two benefits come from this. I can hang my hat (or running spikes) on the accomplishments that got me here. All of them. This forces me to not diminish the importance of an achievement just because I’ve made it much further since. Or to take for granted the situation I’m in. Making the varsity team in high school is just as good as qualifying for the state meet, is just as good as being an All American, is just as good as running professionally. At one point in time, all of them felt out of reach.
Secondly. If I have at one time beaten my own impossible, logically, why can’t I do it again? This is at the core of having hope as an athlete and person. It’s the mentality that you HAVE to have.
Success as doing and re-doing my personal impossible has been skimming under the surface of my running, supporting it, in all the space of my career since I ditched the skateboard for running shoes half a lifetime ago. It’s given me the shots of happiness and fulfillment when I needed them, and these in turn built bridges over the tough periods. It’s what’s keeping me in the game. This is nothing groundbreaking. In some form or another, repeatedly beating their impossible is the basic motivation of most people engaged in challenging and fulfilling activities. I’m just putting the idea into my own words.
So I have a name for the mystical force that keeps me in this business. Now, how to move forward?
When things start getting stale, you can only keep trying the same things for so long. Eventually you need to hold yourself responsible and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
Right now that something for me is the new, bright, and shiny thing called the marathon. It’s the cheat code I’ve saved for last.
That was my position at the poker table coming into this fall ahead of a lifetime first marathon. I hoped that the marathon would give me a chance to reignite my running career, to be excited about running, and to make my Olympic dream seem plausible again.
It has. Last Sunday I ran 2:13:20 at the California International Marathon (CIM) in Sacramento, finishing fourth in the US Championship, qualifying for the 2020 Olympic Trials, and most importantly, completely turning a flagging career in running around. I smile every time I think of the golden, rolling streets of outer Sacramento, our chase pack clipping along neatly through them, and mile after mile gradually coming to the realization I was about to do something like I haven’t done in over half a decade.
I have been so conditioned by failure that success still feels like luck. At CIM I could have easily been one of the guys who fell off the pace with just two miles too go, so close, and limped home to a disappointing day. As close as a mouthful of water short of hydrating enough. I would be in the same place as before. It’s a razor’s edge.
Through running I’ve been shown that one must go through long stretches of seeming failure and apparent nil output until suddenly the dam breaks and all is revealed in its glory. You trudge through year after year of planning and executing and doing and hoping and when you’re in it it seems like you’re going nowhere. Then it falls in your lap. And you’re like oh, duh, of course!
Finding success is as hard as and as simple as fumbling, blindly and insanely, towards some vision. You probably won’t get to the vision, but you might arrive in a place just as good or better than the vision. You'll be just fine with it because you changed profoundly in the process.
It turned out I wasn’t yet in the ocean. I was in the sea, or maybe just a bay, and I believe with conviction there are still larger expanses of water to get to. Because I beat what I once thought wasn’t possible, just when I was starting to give up on it.
And.
If I’ve done it once more, I can do it yet again.
Once, when I was about twelve, my dad casually mentioned that he had finished sixth in the Milwaukee City Conference Swim meet in high school. For the hundred yard freestyle. I might have been riding shotgun in our rusted out ’92 Toyota pickup (the “Swamp Wagon”) at the time, getting picked up from my own recreation team swim practice. I’m not really sure. What I do remember is being plowed over by the fact that my dad had been, at one time, the sixth best swimmer in Milwaukee, that seemingly huge, sprawling metropolis that covered my entire world as a seventh grader. This is how I interpreted it: my father was better than everyone I saw around me at swimming.
Later, in high school, running came along and started zooming my view out. Way out. Within a couple years after falling in love with running at age fourteen I was trading my microscopic lens for a telescopic mirror, expanding the boundaries of what I knew and thought possible. Winning at the city conference level was sweet but quickly became not quite good enough. I finished runner up at the Wisconsin state level, was disappointed, and wanted more. On to college and then professional running.
 |
| "Professional" running. |
The sea is where it gets hard as shit to improve. At running and any pursuit in life. You’re not really sure if maybe you’re in the Gulf of Mexico or the Mediterranean or perhaps the South China Sea where there’s still another larger body of water to get to, another higher level of running. You kind of just have to keep training and racing and grinding and believing, knowing rationally that you simply may never get better again, that you’re already in the huge ocean, that you’ve reached your potential.
That’s what any challenging pursuit comes down to when you’ve been doing it for a long time: facing the other way while you throw resources into a game that, on paper, is ultimately stacked against you. You’ve reaped the early, easy dividends and now every scrap of success comes with ever increasing difficulty. To me (and I’m sure others) the professional running circuit can seem a ruthless landscape over which your fitness is draped, bared to world class competition in nearly every race. You put your ego and, perhaps unhealthily, your perception of yourself on the line every time. There is no hiding. Everyone sees your result. If it sounds like gambling, it sort of is.
In June walked away disgusted and distraught from the US 5,000m championship race with a fourteenth place finish. It had been yet another track season spent performing at more or less the same level as the last five years. I felt like I was caught in a real life cycle of Deja Vu, spinning my wheels and going nowhere towards the big goals I set out to achieve when I left college. Many people would have given it up long ago, and I don’t say that to sound tough or persistent. A lot of the time, continuing to run feels like insanity. Especially when there’s American society like a parrot on my shoulder, silently screaming at me to quit this very unusual pursuit and lead a normal life. Yet something keeps me in it.
I remember the awe I felt as a twelve year old at my dad being the sixth best high school swimmer our medium size city. Twelve year old Joe would have freaked out if he knew that sixteen years down the road he’d be fourteenth in the country at something. It’s tempting to let a disappointing race kill my enjoyment and love of running, especially when the disappointment now feels cyclical, happening again and again. But the memory with dad grounds me. I feel the bile of failure most when I compare myself to the best-ever version of me (the BEST races I've run, the PRs).
It feels a hell of a lot better to instead compare myself to an earlier time, when I only dreamt of where I am now.
 |
It’s not against the rules to create your own personal definition of success. Crucially, one that rewards you even when other’s calculation of success doesn’t. Sticking your fingers in your ears and reflecting inwardly is more important today than perhaps ever. There’s a lot of noise in both the real world and realm of social media to filter through. (Some of the past Olympians who come to speak at Zap running camps in the summer admit they might not have been able to maintain the iron will of their heyday in the current age. Too much awareness of everyone else’s training and mentality can be a negative distraction.)
My personal metric for success is simply this:
Success is accomplishing a thing you once, at any point in your life, thought was undoable or impossible.
Two benefits come from this. I can hang my hat (or running spikes) on the accomplishments that got me here. All of them. This forces me to not diminish the importance of an achievement just because I’ve made it much further since. Or to take for granted the situation I’m in. Making the varsity team in high school is just as good as qualifying for the state meet, is just as good as being an All American, is just as good as running professionally. At one point in time, all of them felt out of reach.
Secondly. If I have at one time beaten my own impossible, logically, why can’t I do it again? This is at the core of having hope as an athlete and person. It’s the mentality that you HAVE to have.
Success as doing and re-doing my personal impossible has been skimming under the surface of my running, supporting it, in all the space of my career since I ditched the skateboard for running shoes half a lifetime ago. It’s given me the shots of happiness and fulfillment when I needed them, and these in turn built bridges over the tough periods. It’s what’s keeping me in the game. This is nothing groundbreaking. In some form or another, repeatedly beating their impossible is the basic motivation of most people engaged in challenging and fulfilling activities. I’m just putting the idea into my own words.
So I have a name for the mystical force that keeps me in this business. Now, how to move forward?
When things start getting stale, you can only keep trying the same things for so long. Eventually you need to hold yourself responsible and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
Right now that something for me is the new, bright, and shiny thing called the marathon. It’s the cheat code I’ve saved for last.
It has. Last Sunday I ran 2:13:20 at the California International Marathon (CIM) in Sacramento, finishing fourth in the US Championship, qualifying for the 2020 Olympic Trials, and most importantly, completely turning a flagging career in running around. I smile every time I think of the golden, rolling streets of outer Sacramento, our chase pack clipping along neatly through them, and mile after mile gradually coming to the realization I was about to do something like I haven’t done in over half a decade.
 |
| Starting to think, "IS THIS REALLY ABOUT TO HAPPEN‽ |
Through running I’ve been shown that one must go through long stretches of seeming failure and apparent nil output until suddenly the dam breaks and all is revealed in its glory. You trudge through year after year of planning and executing and doing and hoping and when you’re in it it seems like you’re going nowhere. Then it falls in your lap. And you’re like oh, duh, of course!
Finding success is as hard as and as simple as fumbling, blindly and insanely, towards some vision. You probably won’t get to the vision, but you might arrive in a place just as good or better than the vision. You'll be just fine with it because you changed profoundly in the process.
It turned out I wasn’t yet in the ocean. I was in the sea, or maybe just a bay, and I believe with conviction there are still larger expanses of water to get to. Because I beat what I once thought wasn’t possible, just when I was starting to give up on it.
And.
If I’ve done it once more, I can do it yet again.
Thanks for reading. Here are some upcoming 2019 races:
| Date | Race Name | Location | Venue / Distance |
| February 8 | BU Valentine Invite | Boston, MA | Indoor track 5,000m |
| March 7 | Road to Gold | Atlanta, GA | Road 8.2 mile |
| March 29 | Stanford Invite | Palo Alto, CA | Track 10,000m |
| May 5 | US Half Marathon Champs | Pittsburgh, PA | Half Marathon |
| June 22 | Grandma's Marathon | Duluth, MN | Marathon |
| October 22 | Valencia Half Marathon | Valencia, Spain | Half Marathon |
