You don’t have to be good at running to be good at running.
When I was a little kid, you wouldn’t believe how bad I was at running. I was terrible. I came last at every single race at school. I dreaded PE class (that’s gym class to my American amigos). I don’t know what it was - whether it was my scoliosis and my malformed hips, the fact I was pretty consistently quite overweight or what - I was just a naturally terrible athlete. Wonderful hand-eye co-ordination, so I was fantastic at sports that didn’t require you to actually have any cardio fitness - but woeful when it came time to run.
But here’s the thing that people don’t tell you when you’re naturally pretty untalented - you don’t have to naturally be good at anything to be good at it.
I had the pleasure to be on a Zoom call with Jennifer Cohen last year, the author of a fantastic book Bigger, Better, Bolder. She talked about this a lot: that talent is a myth. It isn’t a myth in the sense that it doesn’t exist; people are born with genetic advantages into lives that give them such privilege that it’s a leg up on the competition - and people are simply naturally talented at things. But. The good news for the rest of us? Talent only takes you so far, and then progress will plateau. Being able to work hard? That'll take you all the way.
Running is the kind of sport where you can see this, easily. When you get up to ultra distances, bodies are more varied - you can be tall, you can be short, you can be stocky, you can be skinny - it all evens out over a hundred miles. What isn’t variable? Putting in the work.
At my first 100 mile race, at the pre-race barbecue I was talking to a woman who just looked naturally athletic. Tall, skinny, strong, confident - the sort of person who you look at and just assume she’ll do well. She’d never run a miler before, but she’d never really put in any work and had always done well at every other distance she’d done in the past. She hadn’t really trained for the miler either. Surprising absolutely nobody who knows anything about running, she didn’t finish the race.
As some of you know, for the past 18 months in my life I’ve been on a fitness journey under the guidance of coach Don Saladino. I’ve lost around 60lb, I’ve cut twelve minutes off my 5k time and 40 minutes off my 50k time. I’ve developed mental strength and got through the hardest times of my life. I’ve built a better self - inside and out - than I could ever have dreamed. But I was talking to people this week who expressed surprise when they saw my progress photos; they assumed that running, fitness and my body shape were all things that I’d had all along. When I explained that wasn’t the case at all - that in fact two years ago I could barely run, I couldn’t lift a thing, and I was significantly overweight - they said it gave them hope that they could get there someday too. Because the only thing I brought to the table was an ability to put in the work.
And that’s the thing I find most inspirational about the fact you don’t have to be good at running to be good at running - and the same applies to fitness too. For those of us without genetic or situational privilege in our past - who came from a tough spot, who had traumatic childhoods, who found themselves significantly overweight and never naturally as good at anything as the people around us - there’s hope. More than hope, there’s actually certainty.
The only thing you have to do - the only thing - is put in the work. That’s literally it. That’s the big secret to getting good at running. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never run before; it doesn’t matter if you’re slower than your friends. All you need to do is do the work, and it will get better. You will run further. You will run faster. It’s a guaranteed outcome.
And so when people say they admire what I’ve done in the past couple of years - I can honestly say that absolutely anyone can do what I did. I’m not particularly good at any of it. In fact, if you’ve got a straight back, working hips and a neurotypical brain - you’re probably a lot further along the progress meter than I was when I started. But what I am good at is working hard. I don’t come up with excuses. I just do what I need to do, over and over again, until I get to where I need to be.
We come up with lots of ways of complicating progress - as people we naturally shy away from things when they get hard. I don’t know about you, but for me, I love the simplicity in the fact if you just do the work - no matter how good or bad you are at it - you’ll get better. Train consistently and you’ll get better at running. Work out consistently and you’ll get stronger. There’s no trick to it. You don’t have to be talented - you just have to do it.
So what’s holding you back?