You might’ve seen pro golfer Scottie Scheffler’s press conference after winning the British Open. He straight-up said, “What’s the point? I love this stuff, but you win; it’s great for two minutes, and then you’re like… WTF do I do now?”
He wins one of the biggest tournaments in the world, and two minutes later, he’s like,
“Cool… now what?”
That’s peak runner post-race energy vibes.
We train for months, nail the race, hit the PR — and by dinner, you’re already on Google signing up for another. We’re all just goldfish with Garmins.
We give up sleep, weekends, time with family/friends, all for something that feels deeply important and somehow pointless at the same time. It matters, but it also doesn’t. And living inside that paradox is confusing as all hell. Even Scottie looked a bit confused and said, “I’m probably not making sense right now.”
In one week, I heard about this clip three separate times, which is my “pay attention” signal in life.
Here’s the thing: I’ve been feeling this shift a lot lately inside of me. The older I get, the less I care about racing. I actually dislike it now with the costs, logistics, travel, waste, and late start times (I just did a race on Sunday that started at 8:20 am… pure psychopathic). But I still train, religiously.
Why?
Because the training is the point. Getting out there each day or just sitting on a rest day is the point.
Progressive overload, week-to-week gains, and feeling that tiny uptick of improvement is what gets me excited the night before a run. And also why I’m lightly buzzing to wake up the next day for either an easy 25-minute zone 1 walk/run or a super challenging Vo2 Max 4×5.5-minute faster than 5K pace session.
And it’s what I built my Infinite Consistency chapter around: that if you play the long game right, doing the thing becomes the reward. Racing just becomes a weird little test, that I still do (mainly because I don’t like it I still do it), but racing is not the goal.
Because if you need only a race to feel like a “real” runner… You might already be losing.
