Patience: The Key To Success

Patience: The Key To Success

Being patient is essential in this sport, and unfortunately, most runners learn about it the hard way. If we’re striving for success, we must be patient with our progress. Most rewards are achieved not only by being consistent and working hard but also by learning to be patient. This cannot be said enough. So let’s break it down and explore why it’s important to be patient.

To start, a runner can’t race if they’re injured—or even race well—if they’re not training properly. A key aspect of proper training is patience. Being patient is crucial because our sport requires long-term development that can take years of hard work. Patience means setting long-term goals that may take months or even years to achieve. As runners, we thrive on achieving goals, but we tend to be impatient in pursuing them. We want success now. This is where we get it wrong. Our bodies can’t race and train at their peak year-round. Too many runners ignore where they currently are and instead focus on where they want to be, training for that level before they’re ready. Injury almost always happens in these cases. Each training session we complete sets us up for the next one. So we need to be patient and do today’s training session at an appropriate level to make proper progress without overdoing it.

Also, after a peak race, it can be hard to resist the urge to jump straight back into training. This is one of the biggest challenges runners face. Their confidence is high, and all they want to do is dive back into a heavy workload. But we can’t make that mistake. But patience is key.

We must maintain patience as we build throughout the training cycle and progress towards our reward. We need to ensure our progress is moving in the right direction. A good way to track progress is by using specific training sessions as checkpoints. These can help gauge your current fitness level. You can do these as often as once per month. I wouldn’t shy away from using smaller races as checkpoints, as long as you know the purpose of the race. But remember, we don’t want to do these too often; we don’t want to overtrain. If you’re noticing progress in the wrong direction, you’ll need to reassess your training. You must ensure you're putting in the appropriate effort for each session. Turning things back around now is much easier than doing it later, so this requires patience.

After being patient, you can now see the progress you've made. You've done what you’re supposed to do. Now it’s time to put it all together on race day. But let’s not forget that patience is also important while racing. The biggest mistake most runners make when racing is starting out too fast. Most runners are surprised by how easy their goal pace feels at the start of the race. Well, it should be easy. Your fitness is at its peak, and the taper has eliminated fatigue. But we must control our energy to avoid fading late in the race. This requires patience. As you can see, one of the biggest aspects of training and racing is patience. If you want to succeed in this sport, you have to do the right things and trust the process. Be patient, and you will be successful.