Trusting Myself to Not Look Back

There’s a lesson I learned early on in high school as a runner in a race: don’t look back.

It’s not going to help you because it’s going to make you nervous to see someone gaining ground on you. You should run your own race and not focus on what other people are doing.

It’s sound advice, but difficult to apply.

Looking back is a natural instinct, probably as an adaptation for survival. In a race, when placing well matters, you would want to see if people were catching you and gaining on you. I used to look back all the time in races, scared that I was going to be passed, sometimes scared that a teammate was going to pass me.

In my early days, I would look back more, especially when I was tired, and it would lead to even more catastrophizing. The more tired I was, the more I looked back. Because I was tired and dying, I responded adversely when I saw someone gaining on me by increasing my pace suddenly and tiring myself out more, leaving nothing for the finish.

I see races where professional, elite, and the best runners in the world look back all the time for their competition. At that level, it makes sense — these runners need to secure a place and position. Kenenisa Bekele, one of the best runners in the world, looked back constantly in races where he dominated the competition by 50 to 100 meters.

Now, I no longer look back when I run races. I have conditioned myself not to. If someone is going to pass me, they will pass me whether I look back or not.

However, there’s another reason I don’t look back: I can tell someone is coming up on me through sound. I can hear the sound of their footsteps or breathing. I can also tell approximately how far behind another runner is by the time between when the crowd cheers for me and when they cheer for someone 50 meters behind me. I normally don’t know who it is, but I’ll find out when they pass me anyway, and I try not to alter my race plan too much based on what other people are doing.

While I don’t look back on my running anymore, I look back frequently in the rest of my life. I look back at all the past mistakes I made, ruminate, and reflect on them for too much time. I wish I could apply the same lesson to not look back in other areas of my life as I do in my running, but that’s been a different battle.

I have spoken in therapy about how self-critical I am as a person. I have very high standards for myself and struggle when I don’t meet those standards. I have always been conditioned to believe that any grade lower than an A is a bad grade, for example, but that has bled into analogous situations in many professional and personal ambitions.

I had a session in therapy where I realized I have shouldered so much of the burden in my life on my own, and that includes learning many of these lessons on my own. I have gained quite a lot of perspective from my introspection and reflective nature, and it has helped me become a better person. To some degree, there is a benefit to it, since the past gives me wisdom for approaching the present.

But I also fear making the same mistakes I made when I was younger, especially when it comes to not being a good person. I think back frequently to the last time I was intentionally cruel to someone. It was when I was 12 years old. My friends and I didn’t like a kid from our neighborhood, so we made a Windows Movie Maker video about how much we didn’t like him and posted it on YouTube. We were all called to the assistant principal’s office and were told how disappointed everyone was in us.

In the past 16 years, I have come across thoughtless and have hurt people’s feelings many times. But it was never intentional. It might have come from being self-centered or thoughtless, but they are still instances I work on.

The point, however, is that it was 16 years ago, and it is one of many mistakes I made that I still think about, and that’s something I don’t necessarily perceive other people do as often as I do. Other areas include other social missteps, mistakes I made in my first year of teaching, and ways I have been thoughtless or inattentive in my marriage.

I want to start not looking back like I do in my running. Constant regret and agonizing are only counterproductive after a while. I always got jealous of people who seemed like they could make difficult decisions and have no second thoughts, no hesitation, and no agonizing like I do. I agonize a lot and always weigh the pros and cons a bit more heavily than most, particularly super consequential decisions. I wish I could sometimes be more impulsive. I wish I didn’t have to make things more complicated and difficult, but I do.

I think that’s part of what helps me grow, what makes me who I am, and makes me more growth-oriented than many. The fact that I look to the past for guidance so often is sometimes a good thing. On an emotional processing level, there is sometimes a need to feel the pain of the past and process it instead of barreling forward with reckless abandon.

But the key is balance, which I struggle with.

It took a long time before, in running at least, I broke out of looking back. Besides sound, I also learned to trust some sort of sixth sense. I sometimes call it my gut or instinct, but just this internal feeling I often have. When someone passes me in the middle or later in a race, there’s a good chance they feel better than me, so I should just let them go. However, there are times when I would benefit from running with that person. I have to make a call then and there. Do I go with that person and take the benefit of drafting and running with someone for a while? Do I just let them go? There are times when I physically can do the former without tanking the whole race. There are times when I have to recognize that, compared to that person, I am cooked, and need to just run my own race.

Every race I have as a runner comes with dozens of these judgment calls, where I have to rely on my sixth sense to make the right choice. I don’t always know if it’s the right call, but it feels like the right call in that moment. It comes at the first mile, when I feel amazing, but my gut tells me I need to run slower. It comes when I feel like it’s time to push the pace, especially on parts of the course that are more downhill or flat.

A lot of this gut feeling simply is how I feel in that moment— whether I am breathing hard or chilling and can maintain a whole conversation, how heavy my legs feel, whether I have any pain that is outside the normal bounds of wear and tear of being a runner. But that gut feeling is also informed by my long experience and 16 years as a runner, knowing what mile of the marathon it will start to get hard, knowing what point during a 5k I need to mentally prepare myself for to not lose focus and fall off pace. It’s not just mental feedback, but sometimes it feels like the muscle memory of knowing exactly what running 5:20 mile pace feels like, or knowing what 6 minute mile pace feels like.

I measure not only each mile of the race, but every 10 seconds or so. Until I get to the next lightpost or the next crack in the road, I run the pace I feel like I need to run — not too fast, not too slow. I make sure I don’t put in any big, sudden surges on my run. I make sure I rely on and remind myself of the long-term training and adaptations I have made in my training. It’s not like my execution is always perfect, but it is very responsive to how I feel and the sustainable path forward.

I became a much more mature and better runner through my reliance on how I feel, relying on my heart and my gut over my head, my eyes, where I intellectually think I should be. There are times I’m running much slower than the goal pace and feel not great. These are often the days that are hot, humid, windy, where the conditions necessitate slower pace feeling a lot worse.

I used to try to force the time I thought I should run and panic if I wasn’t running the pace I was supposed to. Now, I just let it happen — everyone in the field could pass me, but I am running my pace, my race, doing the best I possibly can for the distance, day and effort.

Relying on these other senses and that sixth sense has been helpful not just in my running, but now in other parts of my life. This has come during my bar exam preparation as an attorney. The bar exam is a test every lawyer has to take to be authorized to practice law in a certain jurisdiction.

I was scoring around 50% on mixed question problem sets on practice bar exam problems. This was not a good score. I had about six weeks until the test, but if my scores continued there, I was going to fail the bar exam. Some problem sets were better, and some were worse, but my average was not where it needed to be.

However, trusting myself and my gut, I recognized I was doing the best I could. I recognized it was still early. I recognized that I just needed to keep going and it might just be a slow start — and I was right when my scores suddenly increased.

First, I started to reframe how I answered a lot of the questions. In the past week, I improved my scores to around 65% correct every problem set, which is well within the passing range. The difference? I trusted my gut. I approached the bar exam like I trusted myself in my running, not thinking about what I should be doing or what other people were doing, and going with my instinct and intuition over constantly second guessing myself.

On a technical level, there were about 10% of questions where I knew the answer was between one of two answer choices that were both very good candidates. I started to read the question again to see if I was missing one slight nuance. However, I started to realize that, more often than not, the reason I got questions wrong was because I changed my answer choice from my first instinct. I changed it because I was overthinking the question, thinking it was a lot more complex than what the question writers were really trying to test, worried I missed something important on my first or second read.

Trusting myself, that first instinct, and relying on that sixth sense, has helped me get my scores increased significantly. I know that tough scores during the initial studying process are just part of the process, but I wish I did trust myself more earlier on and did go with my gut more often.

The agonizing, I realize, is what makes me do worse on the multiple-choice portion of bar exam practice tests. Not only do I change my first instinct, but on an exam with a lot of time pressure, where I have a designated amount of time to devote to each question, I waste a lot of time. Even if I get the wrong choice, for the overall test, if I make my choice, go with my first instinct, and move on without looking back, I can do better.

In real life, going with that sixth sense and gut has made a huge difference, too. It has been a guiding force in what decision to make in a choice when I am at a crossroads, whether I should keep studying or call it quits. It helps me find balance and calibrate instead of looking back, always wondering if I made the wrong decision.

Today, when I was getting an oil change, I sat in a chair in the waiting room. Someone else had been sitting there, but she was talking to an attendant outside for a while, so I did not know the seat was previously occupied. As I got up, I accidentally kicked her water bottle that was standing on the ground. It didn’t knock over, didn’t cause any damage, but I debated when she came back whether to tell her or not. No harm had been done, and it was an honest mistake. Plus, she seemed to be busy speaking with the attendant.

Ultimately, I realized that I did need to tell her. She could have been a germophobe and wanted to wash her bottle, knowing that someone accidentally kicked it. But I was a lot more torn and conflicted than I should have been. I didn’t know whether she would get upset or offended, so a part of me weighed towards staying silent, and I really had nothing to gain if she did. The ethical and right thing, however, was to tell her, and once she was no longer, I told her, and she thanked me for letting me know and said it was no problem.

This is just a small anecdote among many, but there are thousands of these conflicting ethical or moral situations I have encountered throughout my life. The past is valuable in not only intellectually telling me what’s right, but also reminding me of how the right thing to do feels. I was reminded at the oil change shop that sometimes, doing the right thing feels hard and inconvenient, but it will feel gratifying when done.

And perhaps that’s all looking back good for — the input it has on my gut and sixth sense in informing the right choice in the moment, the right move in a race while running, the right decision of what I will do in the next hour for long-term success. Besides that, the rumination just comes with guilt and regret.

As such, I will continue to limit how much I look back. There is so much more of the race to run.

 

 

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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