About Me

My name is Sarah Briault-Smith and I’ve been a runner on and off for around five years; even when I take a break, I always come back to it eventually. Training for the Royal Parks Half-Marathon in October gives me a target to aim for, a deadline to motivate me, but I’m also learning so much about life from running and with each training session, I find so many parallels between long distance running and life. So, here is my blog about life lessons I’m learning from running.

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Lesson #1

Life is not a sprint

“Corr, I could walk faster than she’s running,” shouted a teenage boy in one of my recent running sessions . Rather than interject with a quip, I carried on running… and running… and running, because the point is, it’s not a sprint. Yes, he probably could have walked faster than I was running, but for how far and for how long?

In our age of instant information, instant results and instant media, it’s easy to forget that life isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. When we don’t get the instant results we want, it’s easy to give up. However, many things in life are a process, are hard won through the investment of time, practice and energy and are a step-by-step process; running is quite literally that, step-by-step. By focusing on instant results in life, are we missing out on all of the opportunities to learn, grow and be more through making mistakes, adjusting the process, failing and getting back up again? Have we lost sight of the value of that process?

I’ve found in training that it’s only in the doing and the continuing to do that I can see what works, how I can improve, what I can do differently next time, because it’s about the next time and the next time and the next time… And in life, it’s the same. It’s about making mistakes, learning from them, applying what I’ve learnt from them and adjusting, because life isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon.