Years ago I would often be asked how fast I am once I told them I’m a runner. It is not strange and in many ways this question is the counterpart to “What do you do for a living?” that is commonly asked when meeting someone for the first time. These are questions that address the need to place unfamiliar people in a certain setting: they are used to understand, to set up a relationship strategy. “He is someone who’s got an important job” becomes “He is someone who runs really fast.”
If you notice, the more intimately you get to know people, the less you care what they do for a living. You don’t need to put a label on them because-unfortunately-in-depth knowledge gives proper importance to what really matters, which is how that person is.
Speed is a parameter that always places people in certain categories with inaccurate accuracy. There is no point in denying that there is a kind of social scale even in running: if you run slow you are seen as relatively interesting, if you are fast you are a phenomenon. This is how it works, at least in the beginning. It is an instinctive reaction, a bit lazy but also understandable. At least until you don’t care anymore.
The last few times I’ve been asked this, I’ve replied that I didn’t know (and it’s true, I certainly don’t know precisely and don’t care to know-not because I would find it demeaning but precisely because I don’t care), and then specified that I’m a meditative runner. It is all true and especially reassures the more competitive people who, from that point on, see you as someone who “Okay, he runs but not seriously.” Once again: who cares.
A coach
John Wooden was one of the most successful coaches in American collegiate basketball. An absolute legend. When asked which team he had loved most to coach everyone expected him to mention the strongest. Instead, he astonished everyone by telling them about a team from the bottom of the standings, which, however, he had managed to lead to success. What was he interested in emphasizing? That coaching a phenomenal team is beautiful and rewarding but that it is even more so to coach one that no one would bet 5 cents on, and instead proves capable of prodigious evolution.
The effort made by those guys in short was amazing, not compared to the front-runners (who deserved to be there and were trying just as hard, but at another level) but compared to themselves. Wooden had brought out of those players a version of themselves that they did not even suspect existed.
It is your limit
The question I started with has a twin question, which remains implied, “What is your limit?” Which can in fact be translated as “How much are you going for?” It serves to put you within a ranking and not much else. Leaving aside the fact that making rankings in a sport like running is useless, doing so overlooks the fact that running has a main competitive dimension, and that is against oneself. Some people’s limit is 4 minutes per km, others’ limit is 6, and a great many others’ limit is to be able to put on their shoes and get their bodies on a road and do something they have never done: run.
All limits must be respected. Anyone who overcomes a limitation of his or her own has demonstrated the ability to challenge himself, to make himself uncomfortable, to suffer. He has shown a willingness to evolve. Measuring his performance with a number and a speed is a one-dimensional way to do it: it is a number that says nothing about the effort and will he had to express.
They say to pay respect to the battles we all fight, and to keep them in mind when we get to know someone and judge him. Ranking is judging. Doing them responsibly means knowing that they only say one thing: who is faster. They say it with a number that says nothing about the person, his life, the sweat he put into it.
Everyone has his own limit, and it doesn’t matter to have it higher or lower than this or that. It matters to overcome it, or at least to try.