Each week, two girls from our mid distance/distance team come up with a quote for our group to think about throughout the week and then a week later discuss how the quote impacted us. A couple of weeks ago, the quote was “victory is made in the millions of seconds but only revealed in one.” Last week the quote was “what’s done in the darkness will come to light.” This week it was myself and my partner’s turn to come up with a quote. What we wanted to emphasize this week was not playing the comparison game. Outdoor track has just started. A lot of us just raced our first outdoor track meet since 2019 and a lot of others are dealing with injuries, whether it be coming back from one or just being diagnosed. It’s really easy to see your competitors doing well and get frustrated with where you are. It’s easy to compare yourself to where you were in the past and question why you’re at a certain point currently.  Comparing yourself to a past version of you or comparing yourself to others is extremely detrimental and something that a lot of us struggle with. As a result, the quote that my partner and I found and shared was “the only person you should try to be better than is who you were yesterday.”

‘Take everything a day at a time’ is what my partner wanted to highlight as something she’s been telling herself coming back from injury. You are most likely at a completely different stage of life compared to where you were months ago. You’ve never been through a global pandemic before. You might have been faster in the past but were you coming back from an injury then? Had you moved away from your family to go to college then? Were you in a completely different environment then? Even if you were, so much has happened over the past few months that most likely multiple variables in your life have changed.  It’s not fair to beat yourself up over why you were faster or looked different or did anything differently a year ago just because you’ve been through so much that has made you stronger in different ways.  I try to use prior performances as a gauge of improvement and I document every single workout I complete so as to be able to assess what exactly could be the difference training-wise to be where I want.

Another thing I work on is not comparing myself to others. I didn’t have a great opening to my outdoor season. I purposely don’t look at others’ times regardless of how I do but I follow a lot of runners on social media so I saw some fast season openers and got discouraged. After some analysis with my coach we saw that I haven’t been training consistently for a super long time just due to the fact that my season extended longer with NCAAs, I took a couple of days off, and now I’m comparing myself to people who haven’t raced for weeks and have instead been training fully for a longer period of time.  I have to trust that I’ll be ready when I need to be and it all comes in due time. My partner and I want to, with this quote, encourage everyone to simply try to make daily progress and improve upon where we were one day prior instead of looking way back at a past version of ourselves or looking off to the side at who’s next to us.

We can’t wait to hear what our teammates got from the quote and if you want to share in your comment how that quote could apply to your daily life in general as well I’d appreciate it!