The Races We Run

Strictly speaking, I’ve spent most of my life losing races. This is admittedly a rather maudlin sentence to open with, but I promise you it’s not intended to be read that way. I simply wanted to start by establishing the basic and incontrovertible truth that losing races is something with which I have a great deal of experience.

I was a track athlete for the entire early part of my life. I went to college on a track scholarship and then ran under a professional sponsorship with adidas for a few years after. I was quite good: a seven-time Big East champion, a five-time All-American, an Olympic Trials finalist, and an international competitor—though I only got to wear the USA on my chest as a member of the U20 team, and not ever with the senior squad. Despite this accomplished resume, it’s important for you to understand that when I look back at that career—a career that I’m rather proud of—I do so with the clear understanding that losing races is how I spent the great majority of it.

I lost the 2004 NCAA championship 800m by about one full stride, in what was probably the best race of my career. I lost the 2004 Olympic Trials, finishing 5th in a race I can still see and hear like it was yesterday. I ran a personal best 1:46.16 in Malmo, Sweden in a race where I came in 6th or 7th. I finished last in a race on the Crystal Palace track in London behind most of the eight men who’d go on to make the Olympic finals later that summer. I lost the 2002 Big East 1,000m final by .02 seconds. I lost the 2003 Big East 1,000 final by .01 seconds.

Every one of those lost races are among the best memories and proudest accomplishments of my career. I was an NCAA runner up. I made the Olympic Trials finals as a college senior. My time in Sweden pushed me to #3 on the Georgetown all-time list. I toed the line in the London Grand Prix. I won the 2004 Big East 1,000 final running away with it.

It’s easy to misunderstand track as a binary proposition: did you cross the line ahead of everyone else or did you not. And sure, the point is to try to win—and I’ve gotten to the tape ahead of everyone else countless times as well—but it is also a sport grounded in measurement against yourself. Did you set a PR. Did you make a final you had no business getting to. Did you outkick a more accomplished rival. Success in track is both absolute, yet infinitely personal. To succeed you have to get used to losing races, because that’s the only way to progress to the next one. The sport is a simple exercise in pain management: enduring the hurt on the track alongside the ache of losing off it, knowing you’ll show up to do it again. And again still.

I lost a race on Tuesday. It wasn’t what I had hoped to do, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed. But I’ll be ok. Like the countless losses before it, I am proud of the race I ran and took so much from it. I met residents across the city and got more familiar with neighborhoods I hadn’t previously known as well. I became closer friends with people who had only been acquaintances before. I had the opportunity to talk about issues that mattered a lot to me, and to learn more about issues that impacted the lives of others. I ran a race full of joy, powered by a deep sense of love and obligation toward this city. And I end it feeling much, much more of both those things.

When I was still competing, the way I’d manage performance anxiety was to stand at the line and remind myself that no matter the result about to unfold, I’d still walk back over to my gear and change out of my spikes afterward, and I’d still go home and have dinner that night, and I’d still wake up the next morning. I would ground myself in the moment by reminding myself that all the other moments yet to come still would, that the next minute and forty odd seconds would pass in a flash of gasping heartbeats and the thunder of hooves, transient while those other things are the things that abide.

I have been shaped by a life spent losing races. They have shown me what I can endure, measured my progress against what’s come before, and illuminated ways in which I’ve yet to grow. Even as I am surely a product of all the success I’ve had along the way, I’m also the sum of each of those losses. Each one hurt, each hurt passes, and each one is never the last.

I’ve long possessed the clarity that losing a race is not an act that defines us. It’s a formative act, and a generative one, but never a conclusive one. Each losing race necessarily establishes and creates the only act that can follow next—to toe the line again.

ALXtra will return to regularly scheduled programming next week.