On the first Sunday of every month, I share a note from The Long View.
Not something new.
Something that endures.
—
I have run a lot of races. Three full marathons, more half marathons than I can count, and years of early mornings, long training blocks, and careful preparation. For most of that time, I thought I understood why I did it. The discipline, the physical challenge, the satisfaction of crossing a finish line after months of work.
But there was something I never examined closely enough, something that only became clear after a race in 2025 when I finally stopped and asked myself an honest question: why was my favorite part of every race the moment it ended?
Not the running. Not the crowds or the energy or the feeling of the miles passing under my feet. The ending. That was what I looked forward to most. And the more I sat with that, the less sense it made. I was training for months, sometimes through fatigue and discomfort and early mornings I did not want to face, so that on race day, the thing I wanted most was for it to be over.
I was not running races. I was surviving them.
The problem was not my fitness or my preparation. The problem was what I was optimizing for. Every race had a time goal, and that goal quietly became the entire point. The miles in between were just obstacles between me and the finish clock. I was so focused on the outcome that I had no relationship with the experience itself.
A few weeks ago, something shifted. I ran a half marathon in what turned out to be one of my best times ever, but that is almost beside the point, because for the first time in years, I did not want the race to end.
I had gone in with a different intention. Not a different training plan or a different strategy, just a different internal agreement: I was going to try to actually be there. To feel the race instead of manage it. To notice what was around me, what was inside me, and to stop treating each kilometer as something to get through on the way to something else.
Around kilometer fifteen or sixteen, something happened that I still find difficult to describe accurately. My mind went quiet in a way I have rarely experienced outside of that kind of sustained physical effort. My body was moving, working hard, but it felt effortless in a way that had nothing to do with pace. Like cruise control, like floating. The crowd, the course, the air, all of it was vivid and present, and I was not thinking about the finish line at all. I was just there, fully, in a way I almost never am during a race.
I have read about flow states. I have tried to meditate without much success. But in those two or three kilometers, I felt something close to what people describe when they talk about deep stillness. A complete absence of noise, internal or external. Just movement and presence and a strange, quiet joy.
And then, near the finish line, I saw them.
My wife and daughters were there, just a few meters before the end, waiting for me. In any previous race, I would not have stopped. Not even for a second. Every race before this one had a clock running in my head, a time to protect, a goal that made everything else feel like a distraction. I would have smiled, maybe pointed, kept moving. There was no room for pauses when the result was what mattered most.
This time I stopped. Just for a few seconds, but I stopped. I held them. I felt that moment completely, and it gave me something no finish time has ever given me. It was not a detour from the race. It was the best part of it.
I crossed the finish line shortly after, with one of my best times ever, and the strange paradox of that day is still something I think about. I ran better because I cared less about the time. I experienced more because I stopped protecting the result. And the seconds I spent with my family near the finish line, the seconds I would have considered a costly mistake in any previous race, turned out to be the moment I will remember longest.
This is not really a story about running. It is a story about what happens when you stop trying to get through something and start trying to be in it. About the difference between executing an experience and actually having one. About how much we miss when our entire attention is locked onto the outcome and we treat everything in between as a necessary cost.
Most of us live a significant portion of our lives in that mode. Working toward the weekend. Getting through the meeting. Waiting for the project to finish, the season to change, the difficult stretch to pass. We become very good at finishing things and very poor at inhabiting them.
The race taught me something I am still learning to apply more broadly: that presence is not a soft or secondary goal. It is often the thing that makes everything else better, including the results. When I stopped managing the experience and started living it, I ran better, felt better, and came away with something that a finish time alone could never have given me.
For the first time in all my years of racing, I wanted it to last forever. And those few seconds with my wife and daughters, the ones I would never have allowed myself before, turned out to say everything about how much had changed.
I used to train to finish. Now I want to learn how to be there while it is happening.
That, I think, is the better race.
—
Gregorio Sánchez
The Long View