Aiming Low

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from March 2000.)

I’m not quite ready to tell you to quit setting goals. That would sound anti-athletic. But let’s at least look at goals from another angle.

At the Napa Valley Marathon a few years ago I ran some miles with Jeff Hagen. Since then, Jeff has taught me a lot.

First he has guided me through a medical condition that we share (vertigo episodes, unrelated to running). Later we learned that we share views on goals.

Both of us like to think of them as floors to spring from instead of ceilings to bang against. Instead of pointing to the highest target we’d like to reach, we try to see how far we can exceed certain minimums.

Jeff’s minimum standards are immensely higher than mine. He’s an ultrarunner who does especially well in track races that last a day or more.

Now living in Yakima, Washington, he wrote in his club newsletter, Hard Core Runners News, “In the dozens of ultramarathons that I have run, my basic approach has been simply to go out there and have fun. I do stick to a race strategy, in order to run as efficiently as possible, but I have always steered clear of setting lofty race goals.

“For some reason, setting modest goals seems to work better. With lofty goals comes pressure, and if any little thing goes wrong – which is almost a certainty in any ultra event – one can easily become demoralized. This translates to poor performance.

“By setting goals that are more achievable, I find that even if things don’t go exactly as planned, there may be a chance of meeting my original goal. And if things happen to be going well, I sometimes adjust my goal upward during the second half of the event.”

Before you conclude that aiming low is a sure recipe for setting PWs, let me share another Jeff Hagen story. He went into a 48-hour race, in 1999, aiming high. “This was one of those rare times when I had a specific, and lofty, goal in mind – the North American record of 213 miles for men 50 to 54.”

Before the race began, the course and weather conditions relieved him of that plan. Jeff told his wife, “Well, that takes the pressure off. I’ll just enjoy the race and forget about the record.” He totaled 216 miles.

Goals have rarely been good to me. At least not the types of goal-setting that athletes are asked to do: aim for the stars; your reach must exceed your grasp; if you don’t dream it, you can’t do it.

I caved under the pressure of such goals from the start. Two starts, in fact:

– In my first high school mile I aimed to beat the big boys. The only one beaten up, by a too-fast start, was me, I quit the race after little more than a lap.

– In my first college race I set as a goal breaking 4:20 in the mile, though I’d never gone that fast and this event followed a season of slow training. The time fell short by a dozen seconds and left me despondent.

For my first marathon, however, I aimed low. For Boston 1967 my longest training run had been 20 miles at eight-minute pace. Holding that same pace for the extra 10K seemed a reasonable minimal goal.

I started as planned but steadily nudged up the pace. To my shocked delight I averaged 6:30 miles in that marathon. The new goal became that pace or better, which I never averaged again.

Goals can be stopping places. You either reach them and stop because you’re satisfied, or you don’t reach them and stop out of frustration.

By setting high goals, you set yourself up for high pressure and a high probability of failure. Low goals lead to low pressure and surprising results.

Instead of reaching for the highest point you might touch, see how far you can exceed a minimum standard. Instead of straining to make things happen, relax and let them happen. Instead of thinking of goals as the most you might achieve, consider them as the least you will accept.

UPDATE FROM 2014

A surprising run at the 2000 Napa Valley Marathon prompted this column. Seldom if ever has my destination so far exceeded my day’s plan as it did there.

I didn’t really have a goal that day, except to accompany Jan Seeley, the Marathon & Beyond publisher, for 10 miles or so. I ended up finishing that marathon – my only one not trained for or planned for. It illustrates another practice in the next chapter, “Trial Mile,” and its update.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in as many as three different formats: (1) in print from Amazon.com; (2) as e-books from Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com; (3) as PDFs for e-reader devices and apps, from Lulu.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Marathon Training, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]