Running 103: The Other Side of 10K
Mount Stupid, Valley of Despair, and the Humble Slope
I still remember the first time I ran 10 kilometers without stopping.
I wasn’t fast, but I made it.
Naturally, I started calculating.
If I can run ten, why not twenty-one? It’s just another ten and a bit.
I even told my wife — half-joking, but mostly not — that I should’ve signed up for the 21K instead of the 10K race next month.
I laced up the following week, full of ambition.
The early kilometers rolled by. Five, ten, twelve — I was cruising.
Then, somewhere past 16 km, everything fell apart.
My legs turned heavy. Breathing became shallow.
I stopped running and started negotiating: Just one more lamppost. Just to the next corner.
Eventually, I walked. The rest of the way felt like penance.
I repeated the same mistake a few more times. Still, 16 km was the wall.
With every attempt, I thought less about how to break through, and more about why I ever thought I could.
Eventually, I stopped racing myself. Slowed down. Took walk breaks. Carried gels.
One morning, without aiming for anything, I passed 16. Then 18. Then 21!
No crowds. No medals. Just quiet, tired satisfaction.
Looking back, it’s funny how confident I was at the start.
The journey wasn’t just about training my body. It was about untraining my ego.
They call it the Dunning-Kruger Effect — the phenomenon where people with limited knowledge overestimate their competence. I just called it “the other side of 10K.”