It’s good to set big, ambitious goals. Just make sure you celebrate the little wins along the way.
I have a bad habit of moving my own goal posts. After I ran my first 50K, my immediate goal became to finish a 50-miler. Then a 100K. Then a 100-miler. Thankfully, being a working writer precludes the time off required to run a 250-miler; otherwise, I’d still be wandering the Arizona desert somewhere, hunting my next goalpost instead of writing this essay.
Even within an ultra, as soon as I finish I’m already assessing (read: overthinking) what I can do better next time. Should I have hiked that last climb? Switched up my hydration halfway? Procured a time machine to tell my parents to sign me up for cross-country instead of theater, so I’d have a shot at later-in-life athletic success instead of being condemned to know Twelfth Night by heart?
In ultrarunning, so many of my goals live in the macro. Take an hour off my 100-mile time. Get faster. Improve my lactate threshold. Be as cool as Heather Jackson. These heady ambitions leave me feeling like I’ve never quite arrived, my reach always just exceeding my grasp.
The other day, I was doing hill repeats on the same hill I’ve pretty much always done them on, and I noticed I could get a little farther up before my legs quit. Nothing major, unless you count hurtling past the same half-dead scrub oak while ranchers from the cattle farm next door look on in what could be either worry or bemusement. A little farther. A tiny bit faster. A microsuccess.
What if we celebrated microsuccesses with the same zeal we save for the big stuff? Every macro win is just the tip of the iceberg, sitting on a submerged mass of tiny ones. The 20-second hill stride. The five-minute core workout. The morning it was raining and you were tired and you laced up anyway. Trading after-work beers for electrolytes and a good night’s sleep. The single-leg PT exercises you’ve done in airport gate areas, in full view of God and Hudson News.
Ultrarunning is mostly slog. I spend 90 percent of my life running around the least scenic parts of Colorado with only my own heavy breathing and DBo in my headphones, painstakingly willing my mitochondria to angiogenesis. If Mozart works on a fetus and pep talks work on houseplants, surely DBo can grow me some capillary beds. The whole sport is microsuccesses, all the way down: capillaries multiplying, mitochondria splitting, scrub oak by scrub oak. The biggest wins are also microscopic in scale.
Anne Lamott tells the story of her 10-year-old brother sitting at the kitchen table the night before a giant school report on birds was due, frozen and crying, and their father putting an arm around him and saying, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” That’s the whole thing. Ann Trason, the godmother of all us offbeat goal-setters, once described how she fell into the sport: she realized she could see more of the trails if she ran from tree to tree instead of hiking.
Bird by bird. Tree to tree. Capillary by capillary.
Recognize and Embrace Microwins
There’s a real downside to “belt buckles or it doesn’t count” goal-setting. Recognizing the small wins is what keeps you in it for the long haul. Without them, you burn out. You quit. You become one of those people whose entire post-COVID personality was running one ultra (we can’t all bake sourdough) and who is now mostly bitter and way too into golf or crypto on Instagram. You lose the thing that brought you here in the first place, the dumb, animal pleasure of can I just go one more step.
Without the micro, the macro keeps moving farther away. Post-race blues are real. I always feel a little bleh after a big event, listless and aimless, because it feels so good to have a concrete outcome to anchor my stoke to. But if I tie all of it to one fragile thread, it snaps. Better to weave a net of microsuccesses to catch me when I inevitably fall.
Running an ultra is cool. So is running 5 miles, dozens of times over, on a loop you know so well you’ve memorized which lawn has the angry dog. Coming home from your daily run a few seconds faster than last week, or with fewer thoughts about quitting. Getting up the hill without the existential negotiation. Squeezing four miles out of a 40-minute lunch break and then sitting at a Zoom in your sports bra, hoping nobody calls on you while you inhale enough protein to make Nick Bare nervous.
If you’re the kind of weirdo (Hi!) who runs 32, 62, or 100 miles for fun, you’re probably bad at noticing the smaller stuff. You’ve trained yourself to count in big numbers. (You may, like me, be unwell in the very specific way of having thought yay, only one more marathon to go in this race.) The math is against you.
This isn’t unique to running. Life, careers, parenting, dating, the slow apprenticeship of any creative work, the whatever-it-is you’ve been quietly grinding on for years, is one long arc of microsuccesses we mostly forget to count.
Get lost in the process. Get absorbed by the thing you love. But every once in a while, look up. Notice the scrub oak. Notice the cattle, who are not impressed but are at least watching. Notice that you’re slightly less wrecked than you were last Tuesday. The macro will still be there when you turn back to it: bigger, farther off, asking more of you. It always is. But you’re farther up the hill than you were last time. Notice that, too.
About the Author
Zoë Rom is a journalist, writer, and podcast host based in Carbondale, Colorado. She’s the co-host and producer of The Trailhead Podcast and Your Diet Sucks Podcast, and co-author of the book “Becoming a Sustainable Runner” (2023). She relishes in microwins.
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4 comments
James
Just wanted to say what everyone else here is presumably also thinking: you are such a fantastic writer!
pimaCanyon
yes we are all thinking she is such a great writer! (I am suspicious that that theater training helped her writing, even though it likely didn’t help her running.)
JP
“…in full view of God and Hudson News.” We don’t deserve you, but we sure are glad we have you. Great essay.
Brent R
Wonderful!!