Never Satisfied

I wrote last week that my post-race blues after the 70.3 came from not being pushed to my limit. I have been thinking about it since and I don't think that's true. I am never satisfied. I have never celebrated a single thing I have done, not the marathons, not the 48 hours of running, not this. I am pleased when it is over and then I am on to the next one. Get across the line, get the medal, get in the car, and start thinking about what's next before we are out of the car park.

I always thought that was the point. Winning for me has never been a time or a place, it is being better than I was yesterday, and you can't be better than yesterday by standing around admiring yesterday. Lately I have started to wonder if that's a bit broken, so I did some reading.

There's a name for it. Tal Ben-Shahar calls it the arrival fallacy, believing that getting to the goal will make you happy. He was a squash player who won the tournament he had chased for years and was back to the same stress and emptiness within a day. Whatever you have just done becomes the new normal and your brain moves the goalposts without asking you.

My first thought reading that was the goal was never the race. I spent five months turning up, doing the sessions, learning to swim from nothing, and I loved nearly all of it. The race was just the end of that. The training was the thing, and the race stopped it. That would explain why all I felt at the finish was relief, and why my head went straight to next season. It wanted the plan back.

A 2024 review of endurance athletes found the crash after a big race is close to universal. Emil Persson talks in it about the emptiness after winning the Vasaloppet, and the same crash shows up after weddings and graduations. One of the studies in it looked at ultramarathon runners and found their mood afterwards had more to do with the gap between the finish time they predicted and the one they got than with how hard the race was.

I wanted under six hours and I went 5:35, so on that measure I should be happy. I felt nothing but relief. My guess is my prediction was never a time. My prediction was that I would suffer, and I didn't suffer enough. I predicted a fight and got a long day out, and I think that gap is the one doing the damage. The times I have felt anything close to satisfied were the ones where I nearly didn't make it, the 48 hours, London when my brain shut down afterwards. Somewhere along the way I built a system where the only acceptable result is one where I nearly break, and anything less counts as not trying.

The bit I didn't expect is that moving straight on to the next race is the healthy part. Carsten Wrosch has spent twenty years looking at what people do when a goal ends, and the ones who take on the next thing quickly report being happier with their lives. The ones who struggle are the ones left with nothing to aim at. So a full season of 70.3s next year is what a healthy person does.

I don't fully buy it for me. Having somewhere to go next is one thing, needing somewhere to go next so I never have to stand still is another. Part of it is I don't know how to be a person who isn't in training. Take the plan away and I am just a bloke who is tired, and I don't like him much, and the fastest way to stop meeting him is to enter something else.

Hill and Curran split perfectionism in sport into two types, high personal standards on one side and fear of falling short on the other. Over three months the standards type predicted less burnout and the fear type more, with the fear type pushing pride down and guilt up every time an athlete decides a performance wasn't good enough. I have always told myself I am the standards one. Reading it properly, the fact that I have never once been proud of a result puts me firmly on the fear side.

I have an idea why. I have written before that my part is easy, that what my family deal with every day is the hard bit and I just choose to do stupid things. I still believe that. I wonder if it has quietly become a rule that I am not allowed to be pleased with myself. Lucie doesn't get a medal for standing up. James doesn't get one for walking into the MMA gym. So who am I to feel proud of a swim, bike and run I paid to enter. Being hard on myself might be the only way I have found of making my easy part feel like it costs something.

None of that is a diagnosis, it's me thinking out loud, and I could be wrong about all of it. The stupid thing is I love it. I love the pain cave, I love the training, I love telling myself what a privilege it is to be able to break my own body on purpose when so many people I know don't get the choice. All of that is easier for me than sitting with a medal in my hand and being pleased with myself. I am starting to think that is the hard thing, the one I have been avoiding by doing all the other ones.

I am immensely proud of what I did this year, and for once I am going into next year excited rather than dreading it. I will be on the start line either way.