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How Perfectionism Can Hurt Your Running
Here’s how to strike the balance between dedication and perspective. pirankaGetty Images
It’s hard to say whether distance running attracts or breeds perfectionist tendencies. Nearly 20 years of competitive running has brought so many people-pleasing, black-and-white thinking, results-obsessed personalities into my orbit that it’s easy to lose sight of how extreme we can be.
Perfectionism, according to the American Psychological Association, is “the tendency to demand of others or of oneself an extremely high or even flawless level of performance, in excess of what is required by the situation.” It’s associated with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and other mental health issues. For runners, it can also lead to burnout, an increased risk of injury, and a loss of the simple but profound pleasure our sport can bring.
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If you think about it, racing is a strange thing to do for fun. Hang by the infield trash cans at a youth track meet, find a spot deep into a hilly cross-country course, or stand near the finish chute of a marathon, and the disconnect will be hard to miss. What other avocation regularly causes its enthusiasts to redline, collapse, vomit, or worse?
For many of us, the suffering is part of the appeal. We spend so much of our lives chasing comfort and convenience that doing something contrary to that is uniquely satisfying and sometimes addicting.
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If you’re feeling a little rusty after a year or more without racing, the first thing to know is that your competition drought is, unfortunately, the norm. Although it may feel like races have been popping up most weekends since fall, most of those have been limited to small elite fields. The rest of the running world has been watching and biding its time until the racing door swings back open.
The second thing to know is that there are many criteria for returning to racing like reaching a certain level of fitness, getting vaccinated, or simply craving competition and all of them are valid. Deciding when to approach your next starting line, and how to frame that first race back, is a matter of preference that looks different for us all.