A Bad Run Isn’t a Bad Life
There’s a strange thing that happens when you’ve been running long enough: you can do almost everything exactly the same and somehow have two completely different experiences.
One day you head out and everything feels easy. Your legs cooperate, the pace comes naturally, and you finish feeling like maybe you’re finally getting somewhere. A few days later, you can sleep the same amount, eat the same breakfast, run the same route, and feel terrible from the first mile.
It’s frustrating, but it’s also one of the things Angelique Cunningham has learned to appreciate about running.
“You can have a good run one day and then the next day you have a terrible run for absolutely no reason. But you just keep going. You put one foot in front of the other. A bad run isn’t a bad life.”
Angelique knows a lot about the highs and lows that come with being an athlete. She came to Baylor from the Netherlands on a track scholarship after having a lot of success back home, only to find herself struggling during her freshman year. Suddenly, she wasn’t making finals and running didn’t look the way it had before.
She could have taken that as evidence that she didn’t belong there. Instead, she spent the next summer training, trusting her coach Clyde Hart, and paying much closer attention to what was happening in her own head.
She started visualizing success, but not in some huge, unrealistic way. She pictured herself making it through the first round, then the next. She worked on getting rid of the negative voice telling her what she couldn’t do and focused on what was actually in front of her.
By the end of her sophomore year, she was an All-American. By her junior year, she was a national champion.
Years later, now coaching adult runners, Angelique sees many of those same mental battles show up in a different way. Adults have had more time to collect experiences and turn them into beliefs about themselves. Maybe you’ve decided you’re just a slow runner, that you always fall apart at a certain point in a race, or that you’re not the kind of person who can chase a bigger goal.
Angelique comes back to a question that sounds simple but is surprisingly hard to practice: would you talk to your best friend this way?
If your best friend told you she had a terrible workout, you probably wouldn’t tell her that she clearly wasn’t cut out for running. If she was nervous about a race, you wouldn’t list all the reasons she was probably going to fail. You’d remind her of the work she had done and help her see one bad day for what it was.
Angelique believes we have to learn to offer ourselves some of that same support.
Her own career gave her plenty of opportunities to practice it. She tells Nicky about one meet where she ran terribly and felt completely defeated, only to come back a couple of hours later and run the fastest time she had ever run as part of a record-setting relay.
Nothing about her fitness had dramatically changed in those two hours. What changed was what she allowed that first race to mean.
That may be one of the most useful lessons running gives us. We’re constantly getting new information about ourselves, and not all of it deserves to become part of the story we tell about who we are.
Sometimes you have a bad race. Sometimes you have a bad week. Sometimes something you thought you were good at suddenly feels really hard. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going backward or that you made the wrong choice. It might just mean you had a bad day.
Running forces us to live with that uncertainty because eventually, all you can really do is go out again.
And maybe that’s where the bigger lesson comes in. You don’t have to turn every setback into a verdict on yourself. You can trust the work you’ve already done, stop talking yourself out of what might be possible, and keep moving forward long enough to find out what happens next.
As Angelique puts it, you have to be your own best friend.
And some days, being your own best friend simply means not letting one bad run convince you that the whole thing is bad.
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