The key to being “good” is being terrible first
By NADIA IWACH — nmiwach@ucdavis.edu
My first run left me unconvinced that evolution was complete — when my feet first hit the pavement, I swore the pavement hit me back. Barrelling down Russell Boulevard, I lasted about eight minutes before I saved face with a fake phone call and sulked back to my dorm. Kicking off my shoes, I lay on the floor, starry-eyed, mouth breathing and wondering if I was a counterargument for survival of the fittest.
No amount of humility or self-deprecating humor could distort the fact that I was bad at running. Objectively. Visibly. My limbs looked like they wanted to do anything but play lateral cat and mouse, and the Celsius swirling in my stomach only intensified the growing anxiety that I was undoubtedly bad at something.
I had been humbled by calculus and cold-calling alike, but struggling with such a primitively human task felt like a deeper kind of failure. Fighting the urge to quit entirely, I kept running. One mile, then two miles, then back to one for a couple of weeks. But I kept running.
As the months trudged on, I fell in love with the rhythm of running and the formulaic improvement it offered: if I run “x” miles at “y” pace “z” times each week, I’ll improve. Amid the noise of my early college days, the routine and predictability became an anchor.
Before running, I had considered myself categorically hopeless at anything with a ball and goal, and for good reason. One soccer season, the only point I scored was for the other team. Running, however, allowed me to redefine an immovable piece of my identity with a tangible metric of improvement. Redefining myself as a “runner” granted agency over what I was truly capable of — I was good! Life was great!
In line with many untethered, unemployed individuals, I then decided to register for a half marathon, which landed me in a physical therapy office four weeks out from the race.
“Just a few days off,” I told myself, deeply in denial. One missed run turned into two, and the race day passed me by like a pacer I couldn’t catch. I had flown too close to the sun and my swift descent reintroduced me to the fact that I was still fundamentally “bad” at running: genetically averse and biomechanically unblessed.
Fast-forward to now, I’m 15 weeks out from the San Francisco Marathon. This time, all 26.2 miles. A feat that even now feels kind of impossible, a little pretentious and eye-rollingly ambitious.
At first glance, the leap seems to fall into the trite hero’s journey, which many runners and LinkedIn warriors alike tend to inject into their obstacles. Under pressure to reframe setbacks as stepping stones, failure can only be absolved by appropriating it as part of the inevitable ascent to success. In this narrative, unoptimized failure is a black mark, only second to mediocrity.
My experience was void of that and found its resolution in rejecting that oasis of success and self-realization entirely.
In this lies the greater thesis: Growing comfortable with stagnance and the possibility of permanent inability, I was freed from the pressure to constantly improve. Exceptionality was no longer the price of entry for effort; If I was destined to fail, it was worth failing miserably and beautifully. If there’s a binary of those who “can” do something and those who “can’t,” the only way out is through.
With what feels like the end of the world closing in, it’s easy to feel like there’s no time to be anything but perfect. Compulsive perfectionism feels ingrained, with people sometimes boasting about how little they slept or how many units they’re taking. Growing up in the microcosm of Bay Area high schools, I’m all too familiar with the macabre underbelly of this mindset and the allure of achievement for achievement’s sake.
But running, something I remain objectively and artistically bad at, taught me to pursue something without success as a prerequisite. With this, I received a gift more valuable than a title or a medal: the ability to be terrible — and doing it anyway.
Written by: Nadia Iwach— nmiwach@ucdavis.edu
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