Remembering "Why"
Sometimes it’s not your day. Sometimes it’s not your day a couple days in a row. So sometimes it’s not your season. And when it’s not your season a couple seasons in a row, sometimes it’s not your year.
Recently, I swallowed a tough pill at a race I’d been dreaming about for five months, and realized about halfway into my race that it was NOT my day. It hadn’t been my day the last 3 times I spiked up, and mid-race I thought to myself, “It's not my day, it hasn’t been my season.” And in that moment I asked myself why it had to be today.
So in a race I finished 18th overall last year as my team’s 2nd finisher, I ended up 37th overall and my team’s 5th finisher. I ran 27 seconds slower than I did on the same course 6 weeks prior, except with twice the effort. All summer I wrote in my log, “this will pay off in November,” and on the surface, here it was: not paying off. I started the 24 hour rule after my race, to think, reflect, and move on from a race that was at best an average result.
I thought back to those first miles I ran in May, starting those 70 mile weeks in June, and hitting those 90 mile weeks in July and August. Was it all worth it for 37th? For 26:26? Sifting through my log, which as for most runners not just a reflection about your running, but also about your life, it kind of clicked.
You won’t PR every race. You won’t PR every season. Sometimes, you won’t even PR for years. And without question, you keep showing up. You get your Sunday long run in after the Saturday race, you do another tempo, slog through another recovery run, and get ready for the next one. But through all that running and conversing with friends, you dream about the next race, where things will click, the stars will align, and it’ll be your day.
What got me through my last race was accepting the fact that it’s not always your day and not always your season. It may not be my year, I guess I’ll have to wait and see. When it’s not your day and you have to start digging earlier, fighting harder, and keeping it together longer, that where you remember why.
Why I ran 90 miles a week, why I dreamed of being top 7 in the race I was currently in about 20th and going backwards, why I kept showing up, and why I told myself that morning that today just might be my day.
We don’t run for results. We run for our love (and sometimes hate) of the grind, for the good days and bad because that’s our fuel. We run for the day the stars will align that will probably never come. We run for our Matt Centrowitz moment even though we’re not even the top runner on our team. We’re dreaming of the day that may never come, but reality isn’t stopping us. If you run for the results, they will never come. If you run for the dreams, they may never come. If you run because you love it, who knows what will come. If you run because you love it, something good will come.
Yes, sometimes it’s not your day. Sometimes it’s not your season, or maybe you realize it’s just not your year. And we're good with that. That’s not why we’re here, that’s not why we run. We’re here for the next one.
- Bobby Hastie (@bobbyhastie)
