#002: Today’s Standard, Yesterday’s Summit
I, like most of you I’m sure, have an Instagram account.
And like most folks, I lose more time than I’d care to admit mindlessly scrolling the reel section.
The majority of the content served up by ‘The Algorithm’ is fairly inconsequential… A pasta recipe here, the restoration of an old Ferrari there…
But every now and again, it hits me with a quote or a thought that give me pause for reflection.
A needle prick in a mindless content haystack.
The particular thought jab I want to talk about was an clip from Chris Williamson’s podcast in which he sates:
“You’ve already achieved goals you said would make you happy…”
I have to be honest, although it sounded interesting, I didn’t give it much consideration at the time of viewing.
Yesterday though, while walking home having just finished my run for the day, I got it…
For context, I’d just ran 22 kilometres, a distance which the runners among you will recognise as being a touch over Half Marathon distance. And as I walked back to the house, assessing my performance and questioning my preparation for the ultramarathon I’ll face in four weeks, I was suddenly aware of how nonchalantly I’d disregarded the distance I’d just covered. Until that point, I merely held it in my mind as ‘just another training run’.
But a half marathon is, well, a half marathon.
It wasn’t so long ago that a half marathon was the absolute limit of my running, in fact it’s really quite a recent memory.
I can still clearly remember reaching that distance for the first time while training for my first marathon. I remember the sense of personal pride and achievement I’d felt as I triumphantly stored the run on my watch, the confidence and momentum it gave me and, frankly, the sense of amazement that it was possible.
I’ve just ran 2 half marathons in as many days. That guy training for his first marathon, he needed a week to recover. Fast forward a few years and there’s a box of medals sitting on my bookshelf that he could only have dreamt about having.
All this to say, the next time you’re feeling a bit dejected with your training, or maybe that race didn’t go the way you thought it would, just remember that Years Ago You hung everything on being able to do once what you now do every week.
And while you’re at it, go ahead and apply that same idea to the other elements of life that aren’t running, if such things exist…
