Run Your Own Race

It is Elementary School Track Meet season, and this year Jay has been so excited to be a member of his school’s track team.  Last year several of his friends from baseball participated in the multi-school track meet and Jay felt a little left out because he wasn’t one of the fastest third graders and didn’t make the team.  What changed between third and fourth grade?  Jay didn’t get faster, he just found an event that plays to his strengths.  Third graders are not eligible for the tug-of-war team but fourth and fifth graders are.  Jay is built for tug-of-war, so much so that his coach made him captain of the fourth grade team, and they are headed to the county’s “elite” meet this week. I can sense his relief at being a part of the “elite” meet, although I can tell he wishes he were running alongside his fast friends.

We need to be comfortable focusing on our own event, what we were made to do.  Too often we compare our event to someone else’s and we always come up lacking.  We compare our lives, careers, homes, families, even appearances to others and we can’t measure up.  Someone is always going to run faster, have a bigger house or nicer car, or a family that looks like they stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad.  But that doesn’t mean that our own event or “race” isn’t worthwhile.

Although we joke about kids being rewarded for every little thing, we live in a culture that values winning above all else.  And winning isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  But for every winner there is at least someone, maybe many who didn’t win.  And we don’t give enough credit to those who give their best effort, even when they don’t win.

Brenae Brown has written a wonderful book, Daring Greatly, inspired by the great Theodore Roosevelt quote about “the man in the arena.”  The quote is wonderful.  (So is the book!)

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

"Citizenship in a Republic"

Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

For so long I felt like my own race wasn’t worth running because it didn’t measure up to the ones I saw around me.  I was one of those cold and timid souls too numb to experience victory or defeat.  And while I am thankful to have pulled myself out of that place, I’m still close enough to it that my heart hurts for those who are still there.  (And while mine was directed inward, I wonder if those people who are so focused on winning and negative about anything short of perfection are another  type of cold and timid souls, criticizing anyone who falls short of the ideal they themselves have no hope of reaching.)

So this week I’ll cheer for Jay and his team in the tug-of-war, and his fast friends as they run their races, and myself as I plod on towards my goal of running 13.1 miles in approximately 3 and a half hours.  And I’ll say a prayer for those with cold and timid souls, that they either have the courage to step in the arena (if their criticism is directed inwardly) or get off their asses and actually do something (if their criticism is directed at others).