Track and Field Blogs - Justin Kopunek

For the past week or so during my daily commute on the D-Train, swaying back-and-forth in a crowd of 9-to-5ers and fans lucky enough to have Yankee’s playoff tickets, I had my head buried in a new book. When I got home, I often had to resist the urge to finish it. The subway ride can be boring and it is nice when I have something to read. It is even nicer when that something is about running. I picked up the book, An Honorable Run, after a few recommendations. From what I had heard about it, I was intrigued. The author, Matt McCue, was a University of Colorado walk-on who was writing about his high school and college experiences, with his coaches as focal points of the story. I was hoping to get a few insider tidbits about Mark Wetmore, the Torres brothers, and Dathan Ritzenhein, but the story gave me more than that; a visceral response to the journey of a young runner. Unlike the protagonists in the running literature that fills my bookshelf, the author is wholly relatable to the average runner. He is not Adam Goucher, Alan Webb, or a fictional 4:00 miler who runs 60x400 workouts. Those books are some of my favorites. When you put them down you want to grab your trainers and go hit a long run. When I put this one down, all I could do was think.

There are two topics that the book touches on deeply that I really reflected on while reading. One is the profound relationship between coaches and athletes. The other, what I am going to talk about here, is defining success. I began to ponder what I considered to be my greatest successes in running, and in life. Would an outside observer consider those instances to be my greatest successes? Would they consider anything I had ever done a success at all? In our sport, and in this era, it has become very easy to doubt oneself. Track is unique to almost every other sport (with swimming being an obvious exception) in which you can know how you measure up to someone with out ever competing against them. With results posted online minutes after a race is run, today you can know who is faster than you in your county, state, country, and even around the world. In other sports, stats are relative to the level you are playing at and who your competition is. You can not compare an ERA from a Little League southpaw to that of a Major League pitcher, because there is no correlation. A runner, however, can come back from a race with a new personal best in the mile, sit down at the computer and see results of all the people that ran faster at all the other meets that took place. If you had scored a goal in soccer, nobody can say, “Well, this guy in California scored a goal better than you last weekend.” If you are not at the top of the running heap it can be disheartening at times, to say the least.

The anonymity of the internet has also increased the amount of criticism that goes on between runners. It is all too easy to come across denigration of someone’s worth because somebody else is faster. Even elite runners are not immune to this type of evaluation. There will almost always be someone faster than you out there and there are plenty of people and outlets that are all too happy to remind you of that. What it all comes down to is that in our sport, results (times, leader boards, rankings) are universal and finite. Success, however, is not. This is a truth that every runner must arrive at. At some point, as you move up through the levels, you will find yourself in the middle of the pack. Of course, that is unless you are the best in the world. For the rest of us, success is not winning Olympic gold, or setting a world record. Each runner must define success under their own terms and not let other people determine their triumphs and failures for them.

It is important that we distinguish between goals and success, as well. Almost all competitive runners create goals on their own, or with their coaches. Goals are constantly evolving and being reset higher. Just as in high jump and pole vault, once you have cleared a height successfully, the bar gets raised. Goals are about the future and success is about the past and present. Many of our lofty goals will not be achieved for some time and some will never be achieved. Does this mean everything along the way was for nothing and your effort was a failure? That is something the individual must contemplate. Success is relative to circumstances and takes into account all variables. Perhaps one season you came back from a stress fracture to score at your conference meet. It may not be what you had set out in your mind at the season’s start as where you wanted to end up, but perhaps you still feel you triumphed in the face of unforeseen adversity. This is just an example, but hopefully everyone has a catalogue of minor and major successes from their running career. They may not always be your fastest time, but it elicits an emotional response from you.

It's best we keep these accomplishments in the backs of our minds. If you always have them in the forefront you can become complacent, or egotistical. Keep your goals in the front of your mind. For the times when you doubt your worth or think, ‘why do I bother?’ you can retrieve these successes from the back, relive them and feel the proud of what you have achieved. It is a reminder that we were good enough once and we can be good enough again. It is an idea that McCue grapples with in his An Honorable Run and I know many runners, including myself, can relate to. No matter how far your name may be on that leader board, or if it made it on there at all, if you felt a sense of pride after the race, then that is reason to keep your chin up and nose to the grindstone. Do not let anyone dissuade you, because personal success is defined by the individual and by no one else.