For those of you who have not noticed, Sean Sundwall, 3rd place finisher in St. George this year, 2:18:55, Trials Qualifier with standard A joined our blog. His blog URL is
http://sean.fastrunningblog.com/. In the last 2.5 years he made a most remarkable progress from dreaming to qualify for Boston to running a standard A OTQ time. He also was kind enough to post a summary of his experience at
http://chat.stgeorgemarathon.com/viewtopic.php?p=4275I thought there are some things in that story that we all could learn from:
After a disappointing finish at Boston: "By the time I met up with my wife, I was devastated and in tears. I told her I was done. She tried her best to comfort me but I was not to be comforted. I was ready to walk away, again. " Although Sean expresses a desire to quit in that paragraph, what I find remarkable is that he cared enough to succeed that failure was painful, and he refused to sugar-coat the failure and make it look like success. Ideally, we should deal with a failure without the thoughts of quitting, but I think the seed of our success is planted when the failure starts to really hurt and we face it fully rather than taking a mental pain killer.
After another disappointing finish: "For the second consecutive time, I had to walk a portion of the marathon. To add insult to injury, the female winner passed me with a tenth of a mile to go." Nevertheless, he says afterwards : "Despite two very disappointing marathons I was just stubborn enough to try another. I had to prove to myself that St. George was no fluke." There is a lot of power in being persistent. Your strength is honored in the races that you win, but it is acquired and developed in the ones that you lose.
After the Eugine Marathon: "I finished in 2:29:18. It was a PR by more than two minutes but I didn’t return to Eugene for a PR. I wanted to qualify for the Trials." This was a perfect opportunity to give yourself a pat on the back, but Sean chose to bypass it. This eventually led to running standard A in St. George.
I think in order to succeed in distance running we need to learn not only how to deal with the discomfort of racing at the top of our ability, but also how to properly deal with the pain that comes from laying it all on the line and still running slower than your goal. If we are going to improve, the bar needs to be raised. We need to be shooting for a higher standard. As we keep trying, because the standard gets set high enough to make us stretch we will actually fail to meet our goal on more occasions than we will succeed. That is normal, it should not lead to discouragement if can avoid it, but at the same time it should lead to the feeling of a burning torch behind us that will get us working in a healthy manner towards the higher end of our potential.
