Thoughts About Running

Lofty Goals Loosely Held

Awhile back, I was out for a long run and listening to a podcast featuring Alex Honnold, an American climber.

This g uy is an i nc redible at hlete (Honnold is the only climber to free solo El Capitan in Yosemite National Park) and has some interesting ways of looking at life. Naturally, Honnold sets goals for himself and talked about how he goes about trying to achieve them.

In the podcast, Honnold refers to them as “strong goals, loosely held,” meaning that he has set big goals for himself but he’s OK with not reaching them, as long as he did all that he could to get there.

“If I fail on things, I’m like, ‘ That’s fine, as long as I try,’” Honnold said. “You know, as long as I’m moving forward.” I think that runners should adopt this attitude. I find that we so often set these huge goals for ourselves and we refuse to be satisfied until we’ve reached them.

Some of us want to qualify for Boston, others want to break a specific time barrier at a certain race and the elite among us may look to a spot on a national or Olympic team. These are all tremendous goals, and they’re the things that keep us training as hard as we do. They’re what help us get out of bed in the morning when we’d much rather sleep in. They help keep us on track when it would be so easy to just stop and say, “Nah, I’m done.”

But these goals can also be detrimental to our psyche if we fail to achieve them.

It would be great to make it to Boston someday, but thousands of other runners are thinking the exact same thing, so, of course, some of us will never get there. Breaking three hours in the marathon, 40 minutes in a 10k or whatever time race goal you’re trying to achieve would feel great, but if you never get there, you shouldn’t beat yourself up. Remember: strong goals, but loosely held. As long as you give it your all, you have nothing to be ashamed of. If you get up every day and do all that you can to get closer to achieving your goal before heading to bed, you shouldn’t be upset with the outcome.

I know it will hurt. I’ve certainly felt that pain. But the thing about goals is that they’re always going to be there. Just because you don’t qualify for the Boston Marathon this year doesn’t mean you can’t try again the next time around.

I think we need to redesign how we look at goals. We shouldn’t view them as a destination that we have to reach or as the be-all and end-all. Instead, we should look at them as a long and picturesque path to higher ground. As long as we keep making our way along the path, we’ll continue to get better. If we eventually make it to the end and reach our goal, that’s great. But if we never do make it all the way, at least we’ll be closer to it than we were when we first started.

So hold onto your goals and don’t let go. Just loosen your grip a little bit.