The Starting Line

You are comparing your pace to a man who started the race a mile ahead of you. Or a mile behind. You cannot see which — and that is exactly why the comparison is worthless.

Nobody started where you started.

Different parents. Different money. Different bodies, wounds, decades, and head starts. Some people were handed the first ten miles. Others crawled to the line you were born standing on. By the time you are running next to someone, you have no idea how far each of you has already come to get there.

So when you look over and see a man ahead of you — good for him. It tells you nothing about you. He may have started ahead. He may have paid a price you never had to pay. Either way, his position on the track is not a verdict on your effort.

And the man behind you? Same. He may be exactly where you are now, a few years from now. Where someone else is on the course is not a measure of where you are on yours.

A head start is not a virtue. A late start is not a verdict. Both are just where the gun caught you.

Here is the only assessment that means anything. Are you further along today than you were yesterday? Did you execute your plan or someone else's? When it was time to push, did you push?

That is the race. Not their pace — yours. Not their plan — yours. Not the gap between your position and theirs, which was rigged from the start by a thousand things neither of you chose.

Run your own race. Execute your own plan. Measure the only distance that is honestly yours to measure — the ground between who you were and who you are becoming.

Everyone else is running a different course that started somewhere you have never seen.

Eyes forward. Run.

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self." — Ernest Hemingway