One of the best things about running is that you can see improvement in yourself without comparing yourself to others. Even if you are not winning races, you can feel success just by improving your own best times. In fact, you are I likely to meet more problems than success when you start comparing yourself to others.
Let me explain.
I had a coach in college who told me I needed to lose weight. There I was, in the best shape of my life, and I was told I needed to get leaner to run really fast. All-Americans, of which he had coached a lot, were very lean and strong and I needed to look more like them. I really trusted the coach, knew he knew about coaching distance runners, and I wanted to be faster, so I tried to limit my calorie intake for a time. Instead of getting faster, I just found that I was too tired to run well. Go figure.
At this point I decided that if I was fat, I would just have to be the fastest fat kid out there. I could not worry about becoming someone else, even if that meant never becoming All-American. It was a very liberating idea. I no longer had to worry about becoming someone else, I just had to become the fastest version of myself I could be. Could I have lost a few pounds and run better? Probably. Was it worth starving myself to become something I wasn't? Probably not.
Even now, I occasionally am tempted to compare myself to someone else, forgetting how well I am doing for myself and become disappointed I am not reaching someone else's standard of excellence. I am much happier if I recognize that I am doing the best with what I have and don't worry about what anyone else is doing. Stop worrying about how you measure up to anyone else. Just do your best, enjoy running, and be the fastest fat kid you can be.
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