The Runner's Moral Sense

This morning marked the beginning of my 2013 road racing season with the Weston Run. I'd not trained specifically for it, but in recent months I have done a few longer runs in preparation for a half-marathon in May, and I've now got a good few cross-country races in my legs, so I was hopeful of a good time over its 5 mile course.

We all like a good time but runners are quite specific about what they mean by "a good time". As it turned out my good time was 35:14 minutes - about 30 seconds faster than my previous best over this distance. I was very pleased with this. Not because it was a personal best, but because I knew that, given who I was at 11am this morning, I couldn't have run it any faster.

Many a time over the last year since I started running seriously I have crossed the line and felt, once the breathlessness has passed, that I had not given it 100%. This is a judgement you pass on yourself, and is not based on your time; it is based on your moral sense. Somehow you know that, though you achieved a PB, you could have gone faster. Or, though you didn't achieve a PB, you gave the race everything. I think it debatable which one of these options is the better. But today I was lucky: I gave it my all and got the PB.

And what is your all? It's easy enough to declare, before the race starts, that this is what you will give it. But what does it mean after you start? I don't think it means sprinting off in front of the leading pack (for some it does, but not - perhaps never - for me). Neither is it something you can measure physiologically: your 'all' is not easily expressed in terms of minutes per mile or maximum heart rate.

Rather, your 'all' is what you give when your moral sense is delicately poised between pushing too hard and cruising along. I don't know about you but my body has a natural tendency to cruise, perhaps in someone's slipstream, perhaps at a 'reasonable' pace determined by stopwatch and mile-markers (I don't own a Garmin), or perhaps a polite distance behind a fellow club-runner whom you 'know' is faster than you. Cruising isn't easy. It certainly isn't conversational. So pushing harder than this requires a moral decision to make yourself slightly less comfortable ('comfort' being a relative concept in racing), to be slightly dissatisfied with who you currently are, to commit to gaining on the person in front. And how many times need you make this decision? I would say in a 35 minute race about 1,050 times. About every 2 seconds.

Pushing hard is mentally as well as physically exhausting. The runner's moral sense can oscillate between body and soul like an up-tempo metronome from the moment the gun goes off to the moment the finish funnel is entered. But unlike your body, your soul is ready to go out again almost immediately, in the knowledge that you're a slightly bigger person than you thought you were.