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Friends,
Quick reminder if you're new to the series. Over the past twenty-four years I've run seven marathons, and the more I look back, the more I think those races taught me more about how people and programs develop than just about anything else in my life. We're five weeks in. This week's race is the Boston Marathon, April 2015.
I have a confession to start with this week. I once ran past The Alamo and didn't remember it. The 2008 San Antonio Marathon, the race where I qualified for Boston, took us right past one of the most famous landmarks in America. I was so locked in on my pace that I didn't register it. Not at the time, not after the race. When I think about San Antonio now, the only image I have is the finish-line clock.
And that wasn't a one-time thing. That was how I ran every race. Eyes down. Watch up. Pace, splits, fueling, breathing. Tunnel-visioned on the result, because that's how you produce results. The course was a backdrop. The clock was the point.
I almost made the same mistake at Boston, in April 2015. That's the race I want to tell you about this week, because it's where I learned something I hadn't learned in fourteen years of running, and it's the lesson I've thought about most often in the years since.
Quick setup. After fourteen years of marathon training, I was finally running the Boston Marathon, with a charity bib through a veterans program. I went to Hopkinton with the same goal I'd carried into every other race: a time. The qualifying time was 3:15, and I was in shape to re-qualify. That was the goal.
Race day was cold and the headwind never let up. Through twenty miles, I was on pace, but the pace was costing me. Somewhere around mile twenty-three, I did the math and accepted I wasn't going to re-qualify.
That's when I looked up. And realized I was running the Boston Marathon.
This is the part I want to be honest about. The hero of this story is not me. The hero is the realization that the goal was gone. Because the goal disappearing is the only reason I looked up. If the clock had still been live, I would have run the last three miles the way I ran the first twenty-three: eyes down, watch up, course as backdrop. I would have run past the cheering crowds on Beacon Street the way I ran past The Alamo. And I would have run right past Missy and the kids, who were standing on the side of the road in miserable weather to be there for me, and I almost certainly would not have stopped to hug them. The goal disappearing is what let me see them.
I let the last three miles be something different. The crowd. The signs. The faces. The hugs in the middle of the race. The turn onto Boylston Street, where the buildings rise up on both sides and the bleachers are full and the sound bounces around you like a stadium. I ran that stretch with my eyes up. I crossed the line at around 3:23, which was nowhere near a re-qualifier. It didn't matter.
Here's what I want to tell you, and the reason this piece matters to me beyond Boston. I had been running my career the same way I was running that race. Pursuing the next assignment. Chasing the next selection board. Tunnel-visioned on the next promotion or the next job or the next achievement, the way I'd been tunnel-visioned on the clock at every marathon. And while I was chasing the next thing, the life around me, the people, the teams, the relationships, the moments that would turn out to be the ones I remembered, was passing the same way the crowds on Beacon Street had been passing, how I'd passed the Alamo.
Boston is what taught me to stop doing that. Not stop pursuing. Pursue, and look up. You can do both. You can chase the goal and embrace the moment, the relationships, and the memories on the way to it. The discipline of pursuit and the discipline of presence are not at odds. They just feel like they are when you've only ever practiced one.
I've thought about that lesson more often in the eleven years since Boston than I have thought about any other race I've run. It's the one that changed me.
What are you running past right now in pursuit of the next thing? And what would it look like to keep pursuing it, with your eyes up?
Talk soon,
Ian |
