The Runner Who Trained in Rain

There was a runner, moderately talented, who wanted to win a particular race. She trained in the way most runners train: hard on the sunny days, light on the cold ones, and not at all on the days it rained. Her results were, correspondingly, moderately good. She placed. She did not win. She could not, for a long time, tell why.

One winter she happened to move house, and the route she now took to work passed the training track of an older runner she had heard about — a woman who had won the same race twice, decades apart, and was widely believed to be, at fifty-seven, still faster than anyone half her age had a right to be. She began, without any plan, to notice when the older runner was on the track. She noticed something odd. The older runner was on the track in all weathers. When it was sunny, of course; but also when it was cold, when it was windy, when it was raining, and, on one memorable Tuesday, when it was doing all three.

The younger runner, who had been raised on the standard mythology of talent, assumed this was fanaticism. One morning she stopped and asked. The older runner, who was doing a slow warm-down loop, considered the question with the seriousness of someone who has been asked it before. 'The sunny days,' she said, 'do not decide anything. Everybody trains on the sunny days. The race is won or lost on the days most people do not train. I do not train harder than they do. I train more days.'

The younger runner tried the experiment. It was miserable. Her first rainy training session was, physically, one of the worst hours of her adult life; she felt slow, cold, and faintly ridiculous. The second was slightly less miserable. The third, if she was honest, was almost pleasant. By the fourth she had begun to notice that her legs, on Monday mornings when she had run through Saturday's rain, felt as if they belonged to a slightly different person.

That spring she won the race. Not by much — she was still, technically, only moderately talented — but by enough. She realised, in the weeks that followed, that she had not, in any dramatic sense, become a better runner. She had merely stopped granting herself a private exemption from the parts of the discipline that were unglamorous. Her old training log had a certain kind of gap in it, and she had, quietly, filled the gap in.

This story is not really about running. Every skill has its rainy days — the paragraphs that will not come, the client calls you dread, the practice hour when the piano sounds worse than it did yesterday. The rain is where the real difference is made. It is where most of the field has, cheerfully, gone home. Show up in the rain a few more days a month than your competitors and you will find, after a season or two, that you are running against a smaller and smaller field.