If you’ve run a bit, in a race, on your own, you may have noticed this. You can be running twenty meters or twenty miles. You’re running along, arms pumping, at a good pace. You’re running and you’re closing in to the end, you’re pulling up to the finish line, and it’s right at that moment your body…
Slows down a bit.
Not after you cross the finish line. Not even as you cross it. Almost always the moment before you cross.
Why is that?
We have to push ourselves at the end of a race. Coaches coach this all the time, there’s a bunch of sayings that come to mind: Push through the end. Run through the tape. Finish strong.
It’s intersting to me it’s something we have to be reminded of. I don’t think there’s a real reason for slowing down at the finish line. There’s nothing baked into us from millions of years of evolution, from a protective thought dwelling deep within our hindbrain. It’s not something derived out of fight or flight. I’m pretty sure if we ran back then, there was a good reason for the running, and no reason to stop a moment short of safety.
So the feeling is interesting to me. That it occurs. That we don’t just run through the tape. That our bodies, our minds, they find a way to slow us down in the last moments of a race. And I believe this slowing down manifests in other ways in other parts of our lives.
We always, always have to keep pushing. We always have to remind ourselves to run through the tape. Finish strong. There’s so many things in a run or a race that relate to everything in our lives: you decide how far you’re going to go. Where you’re going to go. You understand the effort it’s going to take to get there, and that it gets harder the longer we go.
And we should finish as we start. With everything we have.
Entropy is a real force in this world. Things always take work. Consistent work. It’s hard to keep doing, to do the same thing day after day, be it a race, a job, a workout. Writing a book. It takes work to finish all of those things, and it takes consistent effort to perform that work. To finish all the races we run. To overcome whatever voice inside each of us telling us to slow down.
This world to me is set up this way, with a purpose. For a purpose. It’s set up to show us that consistent effort achieves the greatest results. It’s a great awareness to have, and a great lesson to hold close through our lives.
Finish strong in everything you set out to do. In every moment of every day. Never pull back, not for a moment, and you will be one of the few people to accomplish something really great in your life. You’ll be the person a step ahead of others. The person who finished the race, when everyone else stops short.
Don’t listen to the voice telling you to slow down. To relax. To save your energy. Run through the finish line. Don’t just run through it, run through it with great force. Explode through it with everything you have. Collapse on the other side, with the deepest breaths, with your heart pounding, and know you put everything you have into whatever it is you just did.
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