Sixteen years ago today I ran in the Olympic trials finals. I didn’t think it would be the only time, but it was. If you’ll indulge me a thread, I want to tell a story about being shaped by failing at the first thing I thought my life would be about. 1/
I came in fifth at the Trials in 2004 and missed the team, but I had just finished college and was mostly excited to have gotten that close. I went to Europe that summer and got my ass kicked in London, but ran a 1:46.16 PR in Sweden and figured the sky was the limit. 2/
I finished third at the next US championships, indoors that winter, and again just missed a spot on the national team. I didn’t know it then, but that would be the high-water mark of my career. 3/
Over the next couple years I fought a succession of over-use injuries and could never string together long enough periods of healthy training to get back into form. 4/
The defining choice of my career was to stay in DC and keep training near Georgetown. Had I instead left to join an established group with more dedicated attention and resources, I might have stayed healthier longer. Maybe had the career I thought I would. 5/
But if I *had* left DC, I wouldn’t have the life I have today - and I love the life I have today. It was washing out of track that led me to taking the entry level job in the Georgetown financial aid office, working on my masters at night, and being here in DC to meet my wife. 6/
I ended up with a mission-oriented career I feel deeply fulfilled by, an amazing family, and settled in an Alexandria community that has formed a huge part of my identity. All of this because of the choices and failure in my first career. 7/
My point, inasmuch as I have one, is that it’s hard to see the shape of things to come from the immediate distance of any single choice. The failure of my track career showed me that we can renew and reinvent ourselves; different, surely. But maybe better too. 8/
Learning I could endure that failure has informed my perspective on so many subsequent things in my life, and what the stakes of most things actually are, what else it’s possible to endure. 9/
I am certainly a product of my successes, but I’m also very much the result of my biggest failure. Sixteen years ago on a Sacramento track I thought I was at the start of something rather than near the end.
And I was.
And I was.
