Ambition is the gap between who you are and who you’re training to become.

My training and racing this year has been … whelming.

After an exciting, if not exactly earth-shattering, 13th-place finish at the Chianti 123K (a Golden Ticket Race) last year, I knew I wanted to go back and try to see how much better I could do.

So I trained more. I trained harder. I ran a tune-up race. I flew to California for a three-day boot camp to simulate the rolling terrain of the Chianti hills, since my backyard Colorado mountains were unhelpfully snow-covered. I lifted. I PT’d. I retained seven toenails, which felt like plenty.

I showed up confident and excited to see what another year of training could do. I didn’t have a perfect day, but I hit my splits at every aid station and stayed well ahead of my time from the year before. With about 5K to go and an Aperol Spritz calling my name, I took the safety off. I pushed hard, passed two women in the final miles, and wobbled across the finish line while a charming Italian announcer came extremely close to pronouncing my name correctly.

I stopped my watch.

Thirteenth place.

Again.

I knew when I saw Courtney Dauwalter walking through downtown the night before carrying three pizzas that the women’s field was about to have a day. Still, I had taken nearly 90 minutes off my previous time only to arrive, at least on paper, in exactly the same place.

I was faster, fitter, and more prepared. I had done almost everything right. And somehow, it felt like I was treading water: giving everything I had just to remain where I already was.

This is an exhilarating time to race in increasingly competitive women’s fields. It is a genuine pleasure to be a woman in this sport at a moment when the field is growing faster and deeper than ever. I am surrounded by extraordinary athletes and generous, fascinating humans who are pushing ultrarunning forward both physically and culturally. This is, in many ways, the sport I always hoped women’s ultrarunning could become, and my true hope is that it will continue to accelerate, and I get to cheer it on.

It is also profoundly humbling to work harder, run faster, and improve by almost every available measure, only to discover that everyone around you has improved, too.

The field is moving forward. I’m moving forward. And yet, from where I’m standing, it can look an awful lot like standing still.

The Gap: Ability to Ambition

Like many podcasters, I have worshipped at the altar of Ira Glass, host of This American Life and an American radio demigod. In an interview about storytelling, Glass perfectly captured the frustration of trying to get better at something, whether that something is writing, podcasting, comedy, or moving through the mountains slightly faster while consuming mashed potatoes out of a Ziploc bag. Years later, filmmaker Daniel Sax turned the passage into a short film called “The Gap.”

Glass was talking about the gap between taste and ability. When you begin making creative work, you already recognize what good work looks like. You simply can’t make it yet. Your taste is good enough to tell you that your work is bad, which is a uniquely cruel arrangement. The only way to close the gap is to keep producing imperfect work until your abilities begin to catch up.

Running has its own version: the gap between ability and ambition.

Ability is what you can do today. Ambition is what you believe might be possible, eventually, if you keep working. And for most of us, particularly the Type-A ultrarunners who routinely mistake a leisure activity for an ongoing referendum on our self-worth, those two things rarely line up neatly. We spend years dangling over the chasm between where we are and where we want to be.

I have been running ultras for more than a decade. I have accumulated dozens of UltraSignup results, a few trophies, several impressively deformed toenails, and enough knowledge about gastrointestinal distress to derail most cocktail parties. And still, I regularly feel like a beginner.

The gap is uncomfortable. It sucks to care deeply about being good at something while being confronted with persistent evidence that you are not as good as you want to be. Even admitting how good you want to be can feel vulnerable, maybe even a little pathetic. I come from a part of the world where I was repeatedly warned not to get “too big for my britches,” where ambition was acceptable only after it had been converted into accomplishment. You could be great. You just couldn’t be seen wanting to be great, or straining toward it, or spending years being publicly and earnestly not-great-yet. Success was fine. The messy, grasping, deeply uncool business of trying was not.

Ambition was acceptable, in other words, only once you had already achieved it.

But I have come to believe that if your ambition is calibrated correctly, you will fall short of it. Often. Mine appears to be calibrated beautifully, because I could receive mail in this uncomfortable space.

So, I’m learning to interpret that discomfort differently. The sense that I’m falling short is not necessarily evidence that I should stop. Sometimes it is evidence that I have chosen a standard that demands something of me, and I’m lucky to live a life that allows for this striving.

The gut punch still hurts. But it no longer arrives with the same small voice telling me to pull the plug before it gets embarrassing to be a grown woman earnestly pursuing a sport that ranks just above competitive lawn mowing on ESPN8. Now it comes with a different voice.

Good. Keep going.

That doesn’t mean every goal is realistic, every setback is secretly progress, or that the answer is always to run directly through the nearest injury, divorce, or complete psychological collapse. Persistence is not the same thing as refusing to learn. Sometimes ambition has to change shape. Sometimes the timeline gets longer. Sometimes the gap is telling you to try a different approach.

But the discomfort itself is not a reason to quit.

Glass’s point was that many people doing creative work never make it through this phase. Their taste tells them that their work isn’t good enough, and they interpret that observation as proof that they aren’t meant to do it. The people who eventually become good at running, creative work, competitive lawn mowing–whatever it might be–are not necessarily the people who started with the most talent. They are often the people who can tolerate making work that disappoints them long enough to make better work.

I think running asks for the same tolerance. You have to survive the awkward stretch when your results do not yet match your hopes. You have to keep training through seasons that are merely whelming.

Keep Going

Have I closed the gap between where I am and where I want to be?

No. I’m still me, with the sort of brain that considers competing in a 100-mile footrace through the mountains a FUN way to spend a weekend. My ambition is still several switchbacks ahead of my ability, looking back impatiently with its hands on its hips.

Closing the Gap Between Ability and Ambition

But I am getting better at living in the space between them. I can be disappointed without becoming defeated. I can take my ambition seriously without requiring every race to validate it. I can keep building a body of work, one training block, one race, one imperfect attempt at a time, that moves me closer to the athlete I can almost see.

Next week, I’ll line up for my third Run Rabbit Run 100. Last year, I finished fifth and ran a course PR. This year, I want more. Saying that aloud still makes me feel a little exposed, as though the Britches Police might arrive at any moment to verify that mine have not gotten too big.

I also know that I could be fitter than I was last year and finish farther back. I could execute a smarter race and miss the result I want. I could give the day everything I have and discover that everything I have is not enough. Not this year, not against this field, not on that particular stretch of mountain.

That’s the bargain. Ambition offers you a glimpse of what might be possible, but no guarantee that you will get there.

So I’ll stand on the starting line next week in the gap between the runner I am and the runner I hope to become. I’ll be nervous. I’ll be excited. I’ll be carrying several hundred calories in potato.

And then I’ll keep going.