Laps five, six and seven are what make or break a 3,200-meter race, according to my coach. It is during these laps that personal records are made and broken. During these three laps, I found it easiest to accidentally take my foot off the gas pedal and let my form wilt as I got tired, making it all the more important for me to keep driving my arms and stay on pace.
Oftentimes, the hardest part for me was keeping my composure: realizing I still had a full mile left at the halfway mark made the finish line feel impossibly far away. As my legs grew heavy and my lungs burned, I found myself falling off pace multiple times over my first few seasons.
My most notable recollection of this trend was during league finals my sophomore year — it was my last meet of the season and my final chance to break 12 minutes. During the days leading up to the race, I made a meticulous race plan, with goal times, called splits, for each lap. On race day, I started the first mile on pace, hitting my self-prescribed splits for the first four laps. But, on my fifth lap, as should have been entirely expected, I slipped off pace by a mere two seconds.
In hindsight, two seconds would have been easy to make up during the final sprint of the race. But, as soon as I realized that I was falling off my pace, I spiraled. My splits went from two seconds slower on lap five to seven seconds slower on lap six. The realization that I was slowing down rattled me, causing me to slow down even more — I couldn’t reach my goal anyway, could I? Despite feeling self-assured at the beginning of the race, I found it harder to breathe. Along with my composure, the 12-minute barrier, a perfectly reasonable goal, slipped out of my grasp by an entire 28 seconds instead. By the end of the season, I was tired, burnt out and frustrated that my races didn’t seem to be reflective of my fitness.
While unintentional, slowing down and letting myself slip mentally by convincing myself I couldn’t turn my race around was ultimately a way to preserve my own ego. Failing by a long shot allowed me to say that my goal was unrealistic in the first place — narrowly missing my goal would have been infinitely more painful. Upon further inspection, I realized that I do this in other ways, too: procrastination, my fatal flaw, allowed me to dismiss unfavorable grades as a result of my procrastination instead of being forced to recognize that my best effort wasn’t enough.
This is known as self-sabotage: action, or a lack thereof, that gets in the way of our success, whether intentional or unconscious. Ultimately, not putting our full effort into achieving our goals allows us to preserve our egos. Instead of facing that our efforts weren’t good enough, we can instead attribute failure to an external factor, like procrastination, not enough studying or poor sleep.
How do we prevent self-sabotage? Breaking down big goals into multiple smaller goals that are easier to achieve can help alleviate pressure from the overall goal and reduce negative self-talk and procrastination. In the pursuit of our goals, it can be easy to neglect our own mental health, so prioritizing self-care and positive affirmations can also reduce self-sabotaging behaviors.
In my own case, alleviating the pressure I felt before every race was a matter of acknowledging that reaching my goals was not a life-or-death situation. What was more important than putting a timeline on achieving my goals was setting myself up for success by controlling what I could — sleeping on time, fueling properly and stretching before my race — and going into races by resolving to do the best I could do rather than achieving a certain time.
Ultimately, there is an inherent risk in goal-setting: whenever we set ambitious goals, there is a possibility of failure. The more ambitious our goals are, the steeper the possibility of failure, and the easier it is to self-sabotage. Achieving these goals requires bravery and a willingness to accept that even our best efforts may not be good enough sometimes. Success, for me, is far less about the time I run and more about making an ambitious plan and doing the best of my ability to execute it — because at the end of the day, the very same uncertainty that makes achieving goals difficult is what makes achieving them worthwhile.
