You Don’t Need To PR Everything
Some Turkey Trot Thoughts
You probably don’t need to hear this unless you’re as Type-A obsessive as I am about progress, but not every race needs to (or will be) a personal best.
If you live with those expectations, you’ll almost certainly be let down more times than you’re impressed with yourself.
This past Sunday, I fell a few minutes short of a racing goal I had.
Instead of moping about it, I found a way to use it as data for my next performance.
The quest for constant self-improvement — fueled by social media pressure, peer pressure, family pressure, or all of the above — is just as much a trap as it is a boon.
The progress that can come from this mindset is almost boundless, but the troughs can be greater than the peaks if you’re not careful.
A race, a weight-goal, a body composition goal, or a blood pressure reading in isolation should not determine whether or not you’re “doing well.”*
*By the way, a side project for the rest of 2025 should be working on eliminating arbitrary numbers from your life. You don’t “need” to be a certain body fat percentage, have a certain VO2 max or weight a certain number.
You have to look at the aggregate picture.
I think of this a lot like investing in versus day trading stocks.
Buying a stock and watch it plummet 5% in a day (or 20% the next 3 weeks) might see you sell it for a loss and have a skewed reality of what playing the stock market looks like.
Buying it and holding it for five years, though (and probably longer if you want real profit) is a more feasible way to understand the cycles of progress that your investment will go through.
Fitness yet again shares another likeness to finance in this way.
No exercise or health trajectory exists in a perfectly upward line.
Thinking that your outcomes need to constantly be better and better leads to a toxic cycle of letdowns.
It’s why I don’t fully subscribe to the “1% better every day” mindset.
Can you really improve 365% every year?
Not without bending the rules in some respect, or rationalizing your 1% improvement in some meaningless area without assessing the fact that you might have regressed and then progressed again.
Similarly, no stock chart is filled with constant increases in price.
Traders and investors say “down days” are “healthy for continuation” in a stock price’s life cycle.
And the smartest of them don’t sell on down days — they increase their position.
So instead of thinking that I need to back out of Hyrox after last Sunday’s race, I’m actually doubling down on my training for it.
Remind yourself today — whether you’re Turkey Trotting or not — that not every effort needs to be a PR or personal best.
Go ahead and try to win your neighborhood race if you want!
But don’t feel like you aren’t a good runner if you don’t.
I don’t want the following sentence to sound like you should make everything easy, because intensity in life matters, but…
Maybe it’s smart to turn Turkey Trots and holidays like today into structured rest to bounce back for the times when it matters — intense periods at work, big performances like marathons, or busy travel weeks.
Your self worth is not measured by every performance or bench mark.
And it’s definitely not measured by other’s expectations of you, either.
It’s measured, at least in part, by how often you can keep showing up day after day, week after week, and so on and so forth.
When you start to remember that the battle is not consistency in improvement, but JUST consistency, it creates a much healthier feedback loop in the brain.
Have your ambitious, lofty goals. But have the presence of mind to understand that they’ll take time, and probably include some “down days.”
I hope that resonates on a day where I’m reminding you that you CAN indulge today and not feel bad about it.
Happy Thanksgiving.