When I took on the role of President of this wonderful club this past January, I had an idea. What if I used the weekly email platform for something more than just announcements? The benefits of spending more time preparing the email were twofold; if I put entertaining content in my emails, hopefully people would actually read them (or at least open them), and, maybe it would give people something to talk about with new people at practice. A well-crafted email, as trivial as it seemed, could serve not only as a vehicle to more effectively deliver important announcements, but also as a conversation starter to combat those silent runs when everyone has been so tired and busy that nobody has anything to talk about.

Thus, while wholly unnecessary and of my own volition, I stuck to it and spent an inordinate amount of time brainstorming how I could possibly write content that people would enjoy every week. Over the past year, I’ve churned out “inspirational sections” for almost every weekly email I’ve sent. Some of them were well thought-out reflections on contemporary issues in sports or profiles on exceptional athletes. Some were praises of accomplishments within our own community. When I really got busy with other things, some inspiration sections became shorter and more comedic than inspirational (you bet I wrote an inspirational section about our Med-Kit, fight me). Not all inspiration sections are created equal, but every week I tried to write something that would either get people excited about a week of practice, cheer people up after a hard week, or at the very least get a chuckle out of people on a slow Monday morning.

However, the more I wrote, as much as I liked subjecting my captive audience to my overdramatic writing, I hit a tough realization. Like the writers of Game of Thrones, I was running out of material from which to draw content. The stakes of my posts were rising rapidly. I had gone from pulling up random comedic news articles to doing extended write-ups of professional athletes who had achieved impossible feats. After proudly finishing up another inspiration section, my mood would immediately flip: “How are you gonna build on this? How are you gonna go from talking about running legends like Allyson Felix and Kipchoge to sharing a video of a cat falling out of a tree without dying, and expect people to still take you seriously?”

I made it even harder on myself by doubling down when I ran out of time to write one, promising that next week would be twice as good to make up for this week’s disappointment. That brings us to this blog post, which is going to be way too long for its own good. With Nationals six days in the future, I wanted to do something special, but at the same time I wanted it to be personalized and relatable to those finishing up their seasons this weekend, especially for those who will be rounding out their cross country careers this Saturday. Thus, this week’s inspiration is going to be all about my experiences with Maryland Club Running, how it impacted my outlook on the sport for the better, and why I believe we should remind ourselves why we dedicate so much time to the sport.

When I joined the Club three years ago, I had very similar thoughts on running that some of the other competitive members of the club did. I was a pretty accomplished high school athlete that had not received an offer to run for a college team and, as a result, I felt slighted by the sport. I had spent four years in high school pouring myself into my training to become as fast as I could, with people telling me I was special the whole time. My coaches gave me extra attention, upperclassmen who I looked up to told me that I was going to be faster than they were when I got to their age, and surges of pride coursed through me whenever a local running news source included my name in a write-up of a recent meet. I set a pair of school records (both of which have since been shattered) and earned a couple medals and ribbons at championships. I loved the idea that people who I had never spoken to before knew who I was when I stepped into a race, and I loved racing and showing off the results of my training and getting recognized for my achievements. However, the absence of a college offer wounded my fragile, privileged, self-centered, Montgomery County relationship with the sport. I wasn’t as talented as I thought I was. I wasn’t special, and I was not going to compete in the NCAA.

However, I wasn’t ready to accept being done with competition, so I decided to become a club athlete. Joining the Club was going to be a brief blip in my competitive running career: a stepping-stone on my path to restore my old way of life. I was going to wipe the floor with all the club competition and prove that I was something more than some club runner who peaked in high school. More than anything, I wanted to prove to myself that my efforts in high school running had been worth something. I was going to run times that a varsity coach couldn’t ignore, and I would move up to the varsity team and reclaim my tenuously defined self-worth.

Fortunately for me, none of that happened. My path through college running was far less linear than I would have imagined, and I believe I’m better off for it.

I walked into my first cross country race with the Club and realized that I wasn’t even within the top seven runners on the team. I painted myself as some hot shot, D1 hopeful runner, and here I was getting smacked in club races. However, I re-doubled my efforts to get back into my old form, pumped up my mileage, and pushed myself to the wall on every interval workout. In the short term, it enabled me to achieve my goals. I finished 2^nd place for the team at Nationals in Hershey that year, and I carried that momentum as I set my sights on track season, where I zeroed in on my first collegiate running goal: breaking 4 minutes in the 1500m. If you’ve ever heard me talk about track, you’d know that the sub-4 1500 is one of my longest held time goals. More importantly, you’d also know that I have not achieved it. Indeed, doubling your average weekly mileage (and doing all of it on concrete), doing extra interval workouts too early in your training cycle, and lifting weights improperly is a perfect recipe for a stress injury, and I had prepared it excellently. Two days after my first college track race, I could barely walk up and down the stairs to my dorm. My ill-advised training had damaged my left knee enough to keep me out of my entire freshman year of track.

After a long, sad semester of hobbling around campus and physical therapy, it was time to get to work once again. I built my mileage slowly and deliberately in the summer leading up to my sophomore year, focused solely on being a NIRCA All-American in the fall. However, I ended up cutting my summer training short in August to go to Peru on a trip with Engineers without Borders, where training simply wasn’t feasible. After missing 3 weeks of training right before the semester began, I had essentially wiped out the gains from my summer training and spent the fall building back up from scratch, resulting in what I would call a mediocre season. Track was better. I set the club record in the 1500m (albeit two seconds short of my 3:59 goal), plateaued very early in the season, and underperformed at Nationals. It was alright, but I still hadn’t hit my goals and was still left wanting.

Thus, I reacted to underperforming the way I had taught myself to react through 8 years of running; I doubled down again. I hit my highest mileage summer ever leading into junior year, albeit in a smarter fashion than I had done before my freshman track season (I did the extra strength training, got off the concrete and on to the trails, ate better, etc.). And, finally, it all seemed to pay off. I PR’d in the 8k by over 90 seconds and was on track to help the team with a historically high finish at Nationals. If you scroll back through this blog, you’ll find an even longer post of mine detailing exactly why that didn’t happen (TL;DR a large section of the team and I caught adenovirus two weeks before Nationals). After reading that essay, you may think “wow, this kid got really sad last year. There is no way he could possibly get sadder.”

Surprise! After having a damn near perfect beginning to my junior track season, featuring my first major track victory at the Happy Valley 3k and a huge, 40 second 5k PR, I was closing in on yet another one of my goals: I was going to be All-American in the 5k. As I jogged to the track at 7AM on the Wednesday before Nationals to do a quick tune-up workout, I slipped off the sidewalk by the School of Public Health and inflicted astronomic levels of carnage on the tendons in my left ankle. As I write this, seven months after that sprain, my ankle has still not fully recovered.

It just wasn’t fair. I had done everything right this year. I hadn’t over-trained, I had done all the consistent work, and I had given everything I had in my races, only to be robbed twice in the same year of the achievements that I had worked toward for so long, bedridden by illness in the fall and hobbled by an injury in the spring. I didn’t run a step for the 30 days following the sprain, but every time I came down a bit too quickly on my left ankle, shockwaves of pain reverberated through my leg, and along with them came a resurgence of shame. 3 years of college training and the goals I had set for myself freshman year still eluded me. I was 0 for 6. If you would’ve shown current me to freshman year me, freshman year me may have cried and given up the sport, because, in his eyes, I had failed, and why keep trying if you don’t achieve what you wanted?

But, at least in my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth. I hadn’t failed, because somewhere along the line in the past three years, I stopped seeing success as binary. For 4 years in high school, I had viewed running as this perfectly linear system where, if you worked twice as hard, you improved twice as much. That meant that if you improved a lot and ran fast, then you had to be a hard worker, which means you deserved to be praised for your achievement. However, I had worked harder than ever for three years and had nothing to show for it. I hadn’t achieved success the way I had previously defined it, but somehow, aside from a few dark moments, I never felt like a failure, and I credit that to two lessons the Club had taught me. The first is that the Club forced me to take an active role in designing my own training, and hundreds of failed workout plans and ideas have taught me one thing; hard work doesn’t yield results. Smart hard work and a bit of luck yields results. Smart runners listen to their body and balance running with the rest of their life to avoid overworking themselves, and understand that they can’t go all out every day without burning themselves out.

The second lesson is far important, and it is that the Club taught me to love the process of training just as much as the fruits of training. I credit this to the wonderful, diverse group of people I’ve met on this Club in the past three years. I’ve met people who are born runners and those who have just found the sport. I’ve met those who have run on varsity teams and those who would never dream of it. I’ve met people who have hit adversity far greater than anything I’ve encountered, and people with perspectives on running that I had never considered. I had only ever viewed the running community as one that supported and accepted me because I was good at it, but until I joined Club I had never really believed that you could love the sport (or that the sport could love you) even when you weren’t competing at your best. The people on this Club push themselves to improve not because there is some guaranteed reward waiting for them at the end of their struggles, but because they love doing it. On top of all that, there are people who love running who don’t even want to compete, a concept which was completely foreign to me in high school. What ties this eclectic mass of runners of varying talents and backgrounds and passions together is not some desire for recognition or a constant drive to be the best athlete. What ties us together is that everyone on the Club, amidst thousands of other obligations with school and work and research and other social activities, manages to carve out some amount of time to run because everyone appreciates running as something intrinsically valuable, regardless of their ability.

Within this melting pot for the past three years, I gradually changed the reasons why I ran. I had entered the Club completely focused on achieving arbitrarily defined goals of hitting certain times, getting certain places at meets, and being recognized as good enough for a varsity team. However, as time went on, each of those became less and less important to me. Sure, I still have some of those goals, and there’s nothing wrong with having them. However, achievement is only one flavor of the value that you can take from running. Yes, I still want to be an All-American this weekend and I’m going to run my legs into the ground to try and achieve that mark, but it whether I achieve that mark or not will not tarnish the incomparable joy I’ve experienced while training with this team.

I appreciate the residual soreness that pulses through my legs as I get on to the bus to go to class after a morning workout. Watching the sun setting over the Hotel after a late workout on the Engineering Fields brings me a special kind of peace. Seeing people show up to practice on a rainy, freezing afternoon when they could be enjoying an afternoon nap warms my heart like nothing else. Rolling through College Park neighborhoods with a group of 15 shirtless dudes as we get catcalled by bored kids sitting in traffic will never not be funny to me. The results I want out of the sport still guide my training, but the result is not my sole motivator anymore. The act of running, whether you succeed or not, is a beautiful gift all on its own, which is something you might forget when your season doesn’t pan out the way you want it to.

On another note, as deep as my love for running is, Club has helped me recognize that running is part of life, not its only facet. As I faltered in my attempts to hit my goals, as I spent entire months without an activity to which I ascribed so much of my self-worth and general well-being, as I gave up running in short bursts to focus on school or other activities and pursuits, I was forced to diversify who I was as a person because I couldn’t rely on running to be my only source of self-worth anymore. I’m not just a runner, and nobody really is. I’m passionate about my career, about school, about my hobbies and so many other things, and those things coupled with uncountable other qualities make up who I am as a person, and the same goes for everyone else. Contrary to what I believed in high school, just because I wasn’t running well at the time didn’t mean I was any less valuable as a person. What’s great about Club is that everyone else understood that. There wasn’t something wrong with me because I wasn’t performing at a high-level all the time. I wasn’t shamed for not running fast when I wasn’t doing well, and that’s because the entire culture of the Club is designed around fitting running into your life when you can, not centralizing your life around it and fixating on those results. Every time I’ve walked away from the sport, I’ve come back and been welcomed by people who appreciate the multi-dimensionality of runners. Running is a big part of who we are, but it certainly isn’t the only part.

So, this weekend, you may hit your goals, and you may not. What this Club has taught high school me is that those results do not define your worth, because no runner is defined by their times, and no person is just a runner. After this weekend, you may resolve to pursue more ambitious goals next season, or you may choose to move on to a different chapter in your life, one where running takes a backseat to some other goal, whether it’s academic or social or career oriented or whatever else. Regardless, what makes this Club special is that whether or not you achieve your desired result does not determine the value of the experience. So long as you appreciate the process of training and enjoyed going through it, so long as you can still look at running shoes with fondness and appreciate that you exercised your gift, then really, you’ve already got more out of the process than the result could ever offer you.

So, I encourage anyone who is reading this, whether you’re competing this weekend or whether you compete at all, whether you’re running pain free or whether you’re icing an injury right now, or whether you’re frustrated by your season or living your wildest running dreams, to, like I’ve done in the past three years, examine yourself and ask why you’re doing any of this. Nobody is forcing you to run every day or spend your sparse free time on the weekends at meets. You’ve made the decision to devote yourself to running in some capacity, so there must be something core to your person that drives you to run, and reminding yourself of that reason every once in a while might be precisely what you need to reignite that passion that you may have overlooked while focusing on your desired result.

Some of you, like me, may be running your final cross-country race this weekend. Think back to that first ever cross-country race you ran, what’s made you stick around until now, and how far you’ve come since, not just as a runner, but as a person. Your motivations for sticking with the sport have morphed and changed alongside you as you’ve grown, and the fact that you’re here now means that there’s some passion in you that’s keeping you around. Find that fire, that passion that kicked off your running journey. There is no guarantee that you or I will achieve the result we want at Nationals, but, in the grand scheme, that’s not what matters. I’ve learned to forgive myself when the results don’t go my way. But, I know for an absolute fact that the only thing I would never forgive myself for is running my final cross-country race, after 10 years of lacing up my spikes, without that passion and love for this beautiful sport burning in my chest through every step. We all love this sport, so, for one last time with all of us together, let’s celebrate that love that binds this spectacular community together, and let’s run a race.

Race with passion. Race with pride. Race with joy in your heart. I’ll see you in Richmond, everyone.