A Beautiful Race

Your obsession with a goal time in your next race is absolutely ruining you.

You don’t need a goal time to have an amazing race experience. All you need is to start & to finish. If you have these two basic desires, a race becomes an expression of your personal nature, your creativity & your drive. It is an artform expressed somatically, in real time. This is the reason we spend the money, time & energy to race. We intuitively understand that racing expresses our essential nature to pursue challenges, to overcome & to transform ourselves through voluntary suffering. Ultimately, what pulls us out of our beds to train hard & to sacrifice in pursuit of a goal is not the goal time itself, but rather what it symbolizes: a unique, indelible experience of running the distance in a way that aligns with our purpose, our identity & how we derive meaning out of our unique human experience.

In other words, we run a beautiful race.

Focusing on a goal time will rob you of this experience. When we obsess over achieving a specific time, we are no longer focused on the present moment. We are referencing an outside source which is a relentless, thoughtless machine. It simply delivers 60 clicks a minute & 60 clicks an hour in an infinite loop. It is sterile & devoid of any purpose other than measurement. If we take time as the primary means of assessing our performance, we accept the machine’s rules of engagement. This inevitably causes us to lose contact with our essential medium: our bodies. We cannot bring our attention to moving our bodies fluidly & in alignment with our natural form. Focused on time, we fail to recognize our connection to our breath, to the ground, to the environment.  The race becomes a rush towards its own demise; something to simply endure so we can point to a screen or a piece of paper to prove we were slaves to the clock.  & who, other than ourselves, gives a shit about the time? These are personal records, not universally valued metrics. Even when it seems a specific time might be important to others, it is nearly always in relation to their own obsession with time, not any celebration of what we have accomplished. The purpose is in the act itself, in the direction of desire through our embodied expression. Perhaps after the race is completed, time can become one variable of assessing the beauty of a performance, but it is certainly not the primary one.  The most important variable is the experience of the process itself, in relation to a beginning & an end.
Now, I’ll admit that occasionally time can be very important. There are starting lines that require a specific time to stand on. These are iconic opportunities that can enhance our experience of choosing running as a mode of personal creative expression. But in these unique situations, the time standard itself is ever shifting: every four years the Olympic & Olympic standards are changed; & to stand on the starting line in Hopkinton for the Boston Marathon, the time is determined by an algorithm many months after one meets the standard. So even in these deeply meaningful scenarios where time matters, the standard’s arbitrariness makes using it as a specific time goal pointless.

Instead, if you place your intention on running a beautiful race you benefit from that struggle in every step, in every mile &, ultimately, every finish line. Each race then becomes a work of performance art that has no script beyond a start line & a finish line.  Within these constraints, the artist’s movement is a pure mode of expression: a simple, clear beauty that does not require time as means of determining its purpose. & beauty in this case need not be aesthetically pleasing. The suffering - the grind - is an essential aspect of a race that every distance runner recognizes as an authentic mark of beauty. We recognize it needs to cost something to be beautiful.

If you resonate with this point of view, I suggest you choose a race to run with no goal time. Take the challenge to see your running as an artform & focus on aligning your strategy & your training around a beautiful race. The sense of empowerment the approach affords can ultimately change your entire experience of training & racing. When we focus on time as an outcome, we sacrifice our ability to be artists & accept the chains slavery.

In an upcoming essay, I’ll provide some concrete steps to reframing your mindset from outcome (goal time) to process (art). Because we have become so conditioned to accepting a goal time as the primary focus of a race, it will likely take some effort & specific guidance to get started.