What the Numbers Don't Show

This reflection was sent to my email newsletter, the Blue Room, last week. To receive these updates right in your inbox, subscribe.

As many of you know, I deactivated my Facebook account in October. You can read more about that decision here. Lots of people have asked me how it’s going. Do I miss it? That’s a longer reflection than I have time and space for here, except to say this: yeah, there’s a whole lot of life updates I don’t find out about, and I do miss that terribly. And the Ted Lasso discussions were so much fun (I may return briefly when season 3 comes out.) But I do not miss the day-to-day engagement on the platform. Not even a little bit.

To illustrate one reason why, I want to share a story about my friend C, who asked me to coach her as she trained for a marathon last fall. (I am a trained running coach, in addition to my many other hats.) C is a strong and dedicated runner. Amid a lot of life changes and a global pandemic, she trained with great commitment, with the right amount of World’s Okayest running thrown in. (Consistency is more powerful than excellence, did you know?)

C had set a time goal that was ambitious but within reach. After the race, I checked her stats through the app I use to communicate with the runners I coach. C had pulled off a marathon PR (personal record) by a few minutes, but her ambitious time goal hadn’t happened. As I looked at her paces for each mile, my heart sank–there was a marked dropoff in pace around mile sixteen. I remembered the times I’ve been on a race course and seen my goals slip away. I felt so dejected on her behalf. It would be understandable to view this performance as a failure.

Understandable, but wrong.
Because then I read her summary of the race. 

After a strong start for more than half of the race, C started to feel nauseous. In her words, “Those last ten miles were really awful - stopped at least five times to step off the course to throw up behind a tree - couldn't keep anything down but sips of water. Could only run for about thirty seconds at a time before the jostling tummy said, 'for the Love of God would you just stop?!' So, I did a lot of walking and digging deep to run short bits at a time.”

Just sit with that for a second. 

My friend and coachee C finished a marathon, with a modest personal best, that included two+ hours of vomiting or almost vomiting.

There are only two places I want to be when I'm throwing up: in the bathroom, or dead.

I shake my head in inspired disbelief at it. That’s a tremendous triumph. That’s a testament to grit and resilience and an almost ludicrous level of stubborn persistence. It’s also the kind of thing that mere stats will never show you. 

Social media, by and large, only gives you the stats. The fleeting headline. The cursory image. Even if people are as honest as they can be, what gets shared is only a snapshot. 

Being off Facebook has taught me how detrimental those snapshots were to my well-being. It started with my daughter’s depression, when everything got upended for our family. It continued during a global pandemic, when everything got upended for everyone. Yet the chatter continues mostly unchanged. Of the many things I don’t want to see us go “back” to, what passes for connection in our hyper-networked world is right at the top.

I want the whole story.
I want unhurried context.
I want awed silences.
I want messy incoherent truths and stories that don’t wrap up neatly.

If you’re able to get all that on social media, I truly applaud you, because wherever we find it, it’s what will save us amid a world gone mad. 

Steady on.

~

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