Somebody will go past you, and then you will speed up
You hear it before you see it. Footfalls behind you, quicker than yours, getting closer. Then a shoulder at the edge of your vision, and somebody is past and already three strides up the road, and the gap between you opens at a rate that feels personal.
Something goes through you when that happens, and it goes through everyone. Two weeks into running or twenty years into it, the reaction is the same. It is not quite embarrassment. It is closer to being marked absent.
You know nothing about the person in front of you
They might be four minutes into their run. They might be twenty miles into it and about to stop. This could be the best they have felt since spring, or the last repetition of something hard they have been putting off all week. They may have been running since school, or they may have started in March and be having a good fortnight.
None of that is visible from behind. What you can see is one person moving quickly along one street for about four seconds. Out of that you have somehow produced a complete comparison of two lives, and you have already decided which way it went.
The speeding up is the part that costs you
Your body does it before you have agreed to anything. The turnover picks up, the stride gets longer, your breathing goes somewhere less comfortable, and now you are holding a pace you did not choose, on a road whose end you cannot see.
The pace you had was chosen for a reason. Maybe it was an easy day on purpose. Maybe you were still tired from Sunday. Maybe you had learned the hard way that going out fast leaves you walking at the far end of the route. Whatever the reason, you made that decision at the door, with all the information, and a stranger's back rewrote it in under two seconds. You accepted the revision without ever finding out who they were.
Then you spend the rest of the session running somebody else's run, and you finish it having enjoyed yourself less than you would have. That is the real bill, and it gets paid later, on the evening you are deciding whether to go out again.
Every road has a range of speeds on it
Any stretch of pavement has people on it who are faster than you and people who are slower. The faster ones, by the plain mechanics of the thing, arrive from behind. Getting passed is simply what sharing a route looks like from the slower side of it. The only runners who never experience it are the quickest person out that morning and the person running where nobody else goes, and neither of those is available to you as a plan.
You have gone past people yourself, probably this month, and it almost certainly did not register. You were thinking about your breathing, or the hill coming up, or something at work. Nobody has ever arrived home lifted by the memory of overtaking a stranger. The exchange only carries weight in one direction, which should tell you roughly what it is worth.
What to do with the ten seconds
The feeling turns up whether you approve of it or not, and you do not have to talk yourself out of it. You only have to leave it alone for about ten seconds, which is most of how long the urge lasts. Let them get up the road. Come back to your own breathing.
Then check the one thing you can genuinely check, which is whether this is still the effort you came out to do. That question has an answer. The question of how you measure up against a person you will never see again does not, and it was never going to.
Getting quicker comes out of weeks of running at a pace you can repeat. Half a minute of chasing somebody up a hill contributes nothing to that, and it makes the next run slightly harder to start. If you want to work on your speed, there are days set aside for it, and they are not chosen for you by whoever happens to turn onto your street.
A minute later they are round the corner and the road is yours again, at the pace you picked. That was the run you came out for. It was never made better or worse by who else was on the street at the same time as you.
Written to encourage, not to diagnose. If something hurts or feels wrong, please speak to a doctor.