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Running Is The Best Analogy For Life

The journey of progress and improvement is never linear

Ryan Fan
8 min readOct 15, 2022
Photo by Somruthai Keawjan on Unsplash

I’ve been running competitively for the past 12 years, with five marathons and three half marathons under my belt. I woke up suddenly around 2:45 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep, and I have another marathon in four hours where I’m going for a personal best. I hope to run 2:35 in the marathon or go under 5:55 mile pace for the entire marathon.

Dozens of times, I wanted to call it quits on running. Five months ago was one of these periods. I was taking it too seriously and burnt out trying to focus on running personal bests and fast times. I loved my friends and the people I met — the competitions and actually running, maybe not so much.

It’s been a very strong love-hate relationship with the sport.

And I am certainly not alone.

Every competitive runner both loves and hates the sport

I had a lot of friends that were super hardcore about running in high school and then fell out of love with it. Most of them barely run anymore and are into other hobbies like weight-lifting, swimming, or more frivolous things like fantasy football.

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Ryan Fan
Ryan Fan

Written by Ryan Fan

Believer, Baltimore City IEP Chair, and 2:35 marathon runner. Diehard fan of “The Wire.”

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