Face your race
As I ran this morning, I encountered several others running/jogging but two caught my attention, perhaps because we were going in the same direction.
A guy in red showed up beside me, doing a fast run up the bridge. I admired his speed but wondered if he would be able to maintain it going up the steep end of the bridge. I wasn’t surprised when he stopped running and began to walk. Next thing, he started running again. Then walked. I realized this was his pattern. I wondered if he was a short distance runner…..a sprinter.
I had to advise myself to maintain my pace and not try to speed up like him because we had our individual training goals and mine was to train for long distance running. The pace and pattern with which we run as individuals in the race of life differ depending on our purposes. Our training also has to be such that prepares and equips us to fulfil our purpose and reach our goals. So there’s no need looking at another athlete and complaining that your own training is tougher. We must trust our Coach and submit to the discipline of training to run our race effectively and to win crowns at the finish line.
It’s easy to see a faster runner and excuse ourselves with the above reasoning but what happens when we see another runner that seems to be runner slower than us? Our natural instinct is not to make the same excuse for others as we make for ourselves. Rather, we judge the person. “Is he a serious runner at all?” We forget that he’s running his own race. We forget that we don’t know how long or far he’d been running before we saw him (because if you see me at the start of my run and you see me around the 5km mark, the difference is clear…lol). The second fellow I saw fell into this category and, of course, he turned off to continue following his own course and I was left to continue on mine. Who am I to judge him?
Let us all face our courses and run with diligence the race before us knowing we’re not racing against or in competition with other runners.