In the United States, one can qualify for trials for the Olympics even as a mere athlete. Just, of course, do certain times, which, for the marathon, are those under 2 hours 45 for women.
This threshold is what , kept in mind for her long and strenuous workouts: .
You can already tell from the kind of work she does that she is not a young athlete, much less followed by medical and coaching staffs. This is a worker who, like almost all of us, used to work out in her spare time and, if she does not have spare time, she steals it from sleep or finds it with her teeth, if necessary.
Lindsay is not even 25 years old. He is well over 30 and has never made even close to the times required to qualify for the Olympics. Yet as a good journalist, she noticed that more and more women around her were running harder and harder and achieving more and more incredible results.
There were also numbers to comfort and motivate her: in 2017, Shalane Flanagan won the New York City Marathon after 4 decades that no American won it. He is 36 years old. At the 2016 trials qualifiers to qualify were only 198 women. This year there were 511. Of men capable of qualifying in this proportion, none have been seen.
Something must have happened.
Determination
In his engaging account in the pages of The New York Times.
During last summer he began training with the goal of significantly improving his speed and endurance. The formula is no different from what you already know: consistent training, motivation, repetitions, mix it up and do it n times.
What she fortified and honed, parallel to her physical fitness, was the realization that she could change, improve, and that it applied not only to running but to her life more broadly. Achieving results in running activated a switch in her brain and convinced her that if she could dare in one area she could do so in many others. He thus achieved very important results in his work, noting that if he could impose a discipline that produced results in a certain area, this attitude also applied to the rest of what he did.
Change of perspective
One of the most powerful brakes on our evolution, Lindsay notes, is the habit we have of thinking that things cannot change. After the age of 30, peak physical performance is exceeded, and you will never achieve significant results again. The biological clock is relentless. You can’t do it; you are a victim of the passing of time.
What if it is not true? To prove it Lindsay shifted her focus further and further away from the very famous comfort zone, finding that what makes one uncomfortable continues to do so. As she writes:
It is not true that you can be comfortable with what makes you uncomfortable. It never becomes pleasant. It may become possible to succeed, however.
In the end, undergoing very demanding training did not allow Lindsay to achieve something perhaps beyond her reach, but it left her with a more valuable legacy: setting very ambitious goals may consign us to failure but it allows us to raise the bar of expectations and achievement. Failing to make the time to qualify for the Olympics made her realize that, nevertheless, remarkable physical improvement was in her grasp and in her legs. He experienced it and got it, although it was not enough. Would she have succeeded if she had not dared? Almost certainly not because he had no particular goal.
The existential lesson from this is not pessimistic: failing did not negate the meaning of the path taken. Along the way, he discovered a better version of himself that he did not suspect existed and gained benefits that went beyond physical preparation and radiated to his professional life as well.
Just treasure the experiences, dream big, set ambitious but not unrealistic goals, and understand that failure always leaves something good behind: it is possible to fail and yet improve and discover talents and qualities along the way. It is always worthwhile to say to oneself, “Why not?” Very often the answer is “Indeed: why not? Let’s do it.”
(Photo by Stage 7 Photography on Unsplash)