My college coach always taught her athletes to focus on the
positive qualities of each racing experience. In her eyes, a bad race was, if nothing else, a valuable learning opportunity. Over the years, this approach to
race evaluation has yielded many important lessons: Fudging your entry time is
not always a good idea. Pop-Tarts are not an appropriate pre-race meal.
Official lap-counters cannot always be trusted.
A couple of weeks ago, I raced a 5K in Arizona and learned
that there is, in fact, such thing as a “perfect” race—one that does not
require any sort of post-race effort to identify the “positives,” because the
entire affair is, from start to finish, one big, sweaty bundle of positivity.
Last weekend, exactly seven days after my perfect 5K, I
decided to push my luck by entering another race. Considering that the second
race occurred in Montana and was double the distance of the first one, I’m not
really sure what I was thinking; I can only surmise that the thin mountain air
compromised my brain function, severely impairing my ability to think logically. I mean, honestly, what are the chances of hitting the jackpot two
weekends in a row?
“Slim to none,” you might say.
Somewhere between the freezing temperatures, icy wind, high
altitude and aggressively long hills, “slim” got thrown out the frost-covered
window. Before I even finished my warm-up, I knew there was exactly “none”
chance of repeating the flawless race experience I had achieved just one week
prior.
And…I was right. I know, I know, this story would be so much
cooler if I told you that through the power of positive thinking and sheer
determination, I was able to overcome the odds and pull out another perfect
race in spite of decidedly imperfect conditions—or, at the very least, that I
found five dollars. But alas, unlike Mary Cain—who can expect a perfect race
pretty much every time she toes a starting line—I am human. (And in this
economy, people are much more careful with their five-dollar bills.)
The problem, I have realized, is that once you find
perfection, it is very difficult to replicate. Now that I know what perfect is,
no other race will ever measure up. This is at once immensely satisfying and
immensely depressing—like getting a surprise upgrade to business class only to
have every subsequent flight for the rest of your life ruined by the memory of
fully reclining seats, excess legroom and complimentary cocktails.
Similarly, even though I ended up winning the 10K outright
by nearly six minutes, I did not feel entirely fulfilled. There was that
lingering feeling that it could have been better—if it had been warmer, if the wind had been calmer, if the course had
been flatter, if I’d had more competition, blah, blah, blah…
Not to mention that my prize as the overall female winner
was a pair of size 9.5-11 athletic socks. But hey, let’s focus on the
positive: I’m sure they’ll come in handy somewhere down the road—if I unexpectedly turn into an exceptionally large man, for example.
And now, because I just couldn’t resist, here is a crude
artistic rendering of myself as an exceptionally large man:
The real Brooke Hogan
