Personal Betting

I’ve always been a competitor, ever since I was the fastest kid in a run during gym class in school. Seeing how fast I can run has long been my primary motivation to be a runner. Oddly enough, that’s why I stopped running for a few years after college. My goal then had been to break 9:00 for two miles, and I did. I didn’t see the point in racing anymore, so I didn’t see the point in running anymore. (Now, of course, I know better. What’s that about youth being wasted on the young?)
I was fortunate to be able to win races when I was younger. I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that doing so wasn’t incredibly satisfying. Let me tell you, if you ever need motivation to get out the door for a run on a tough New England winter day, try telling yourself that you’ll be defending your title at the Boston Marathon in a couple of months. It worked wonders for me.
But even when I raced for place, I was also always focused on my finishing times in races. Now that I don’t win races anymore, I’m even more fanatical about them. I’m certainly not alone in that regard. For many runners, setting personal records, or getting under a certain barrier for a distance, or seeing how their time at a race this year compares to what they ran there last year, or any of the million other ways that you can look at your running times provides the biggest reason to race. There’s something intoxicating about racing against yourself.
Your race times provide an objective record of your accomplishment on that day. There’s just no way around it—your race time is how long it took you to run this course on this day. Unlike other sports competitions, races are about unadulterated human performance. In other sports, you’re maneuvering against your opponents and trying to finesse some piece of equipment. When you race for time, it’s just you, the elements, and the clock.
Nothing else I’ve found in sports gives you that yes-or-no sense of accomplishment that racing for time does. Suppose you play on a softball team. How do you know whether you’ve had a good game? There are so many variables that you don’t have primary control over. Did you get two hits because you swung the bat well or because the other team’s pitcher stunk? What about when you made that nice play at third base, but the first baseman flubbed your throw, or the umpire made the wrong call? There’s none of that uncertainty when you race for time.
Earlier in this chapter, I told you how aiming for a race is one of the best ways to set the short-term goals I keep recommending. On top of that, aiming toward a race and having a time goal for it helps to keep you running even more. It lends a logic to your training—with the race as your goal, you have a better idea of what types of running you should be doing. Those time goals are a great answer for that little voice in your head that’s occasionally going to say, “Why are you doing this?”