“Sometimes it hurts to know you can do it. It’s an intimidating thing to realize because it means that the only person who can really define your growth and happiness is yourself. There is no shortcut to becoming your best self. The responsibility is on you.”
-Alexi Pappas
“[I]nertia, property of a body by virtue of which it opposes any agency that attempts to put it in motion, or if it is moving, to change the magnitude or direction of its velocity… A moving body keeps moving not because of its inertia but only because of the absence of a force to slow it down, change its course, or speed it up.”
-Encyclopaedia Britannica
My junior year of college, I traveled with my cross country team to the DIII championships in Wisconsin, where we knew it would be bitterly cold. Instead of buying myself a long sleeve shirt, I asked my coach before we left if I could borrow a pair of arm warmers from him. He agreed. The night before the race, when I asked him for the gear, he stared at me blankly. “I didn’t bring them,” he said. “I thought you didn’t need them.” I ended up snagging a pair that someone from the men’s team wore in the race before ours. The flimsy material had stretched over his broad forearms and fell limp around my wrists. As the gun fired and two hundred seventy-eight runners who were better prepared and much warmer than I was closed in around me, and I felt the cold biting at my skin, my whole body shut down: my chest tightened, my throat constricted, my shoulders squeezed themselves up next to my ears, and my legs shriveled into nubs.
A few months later, I found myself in the 3k at the indoor track championships. It was my first time running in a semifinal. The four fastest runners from each heat, plus the next two fastest times, would advance to the finals. I had no idea what to expect- I had never run in a qualifying heat before- but I knew that my strategy was to follow the fast people. I did not have the strength to push ahead of them, or the experience to set the pace myself. The lead pack started out ridiculously slow, but I was terrified of breaking away, so I stayed back where I belonged. Suddenly, the leaders cranked up the pace. The pain set in. I panicked. The top four, along with several other runners, swept ahead as I struggled to keep my lungs open.
I watched a younger teammate, Lisa, run in the following heat. She had not expected to qualify for the meet, and in fact she wouldn’t have been there if a record number of people hadn’t scratched. She was decidedly an underdog. She almost immediately took the lead. Several people passed her in the last stretch, but her performance was strong enough to qualify for the finals. The following day, she placed fifth and became an All-American. She was kind enough to console me, saying that the awkward pacing had thrown me off. But I saw that she had taken charge and I hadn’t. Similarly, it had been convenient for me to blame the cold and my absentminded coach for my failure at the cross country championship, but the bigger problem was that I had relied on someone else to provide a crucial ingredient for my success. Even if my coach had pulled through, I would have lacked a sense of ownership over my performance.
By the following year, I had started to recognize this pattern, but it still nearly cost me the chance to run again at indoor nationals. I had set my sights on qualifying in the 5k, and my last chance to do so was at the conference championships. This time, I decided to take the lead from the beginning. But just as I was preparing for my warmup, my coach approached me. A group of girls from a rival school would be pacing each other to get to nationals. All you have to do is follow them, he told me. You don’t have to do any of the brain work. I took his advice, but in the first two laps I was already starting to question myself. If I wanted to qualify, I had to cling to these people like a rickety trailer hitched to a pickup truck. I felt precariously balanced in an impossibly tight space. My legs started to hurt almost immediately. I fell back. Before I finished, the front runners were lapping me.
The next day’s 3k was my last chance to redeem myself. This time, Lisa was also in the race. She had run consistently faster than I had throughout the year, I knew she would hold nothing back, and this time I was confident that by following her I could push myself to my limit. Sure enough, I finished a few seconds behind her with an enormous PR and a guaranteed spot at nationals. I congratulated myself for quieting my self-doubt and finally pushing through the pain.
However, I still was unsure if I had run my own race. That question turned out to be particularly pressing for Lisa, who confronted me a few days later. Of course she took the initiative to start that conversation, while I skulked nervously in the shadows. This was not the first time I had paced off of her: I had been riding her tail through almost every workout. She felt that I was more concerned with beating her than competing with anyone else, that I was racing the workouts and creating unnecessary tension. I wanted to protest, but I couldn’t deny that I compared myself to her incessantly. To counter the jealousy I felt rising in myself, I had told myself to accept my place behind her.
I had been relying on inertia and external forces to keep myself going, hanging back while I allowed someone else to set the pace, depending on others to make sure I was prepared. This strategy worked just fine until those external forces became unpredictable, or additional forces came into play. As soon as the leader’s pace surged or faltered, or my coach had a lapse of memory, or pain started to bear down, inertia was not enough to keep me going. I had to supply my own force, and I still hadn’t accepted that I could do it.