About a month ago I was easing into the homeward leg of my long run on the local bike path when a runner darted past me. Comparison is the thief of joy, but in moments like that it's hard not to: she had an effortless mile-eating stride, her shoulders were loose and fluid, her marathon t-shirt bright, her footsteps whispers on pavement.

I've been regularly running for five years and at this point I see myself as a committed amateur. I am putting up times and distances that I would have regarded as ludicrous fantasy five years ago—but they aren't anywhere close to qualifying for a halfway decent high school track or cross country team. Not bad for a guy in his early 40s with a sedentary job and no history in the pursuit! But I don't marathon, I don't race, I just put one foot in front of the other. I've done that enough in the last five years that I'm much better at it than I used to be. And this is one of the reasons I love running! (At this point and to my surprise I do have to concede that I love running, most of the time.) In a few areas of my life I have real Shounen Jump, king-of-the-pirates level ambition and I strive to put in the effort to match; in running, for me, "it's okay to be okay!"

But, running on the public trail, you often see people who really have the stuff. It's wonderful and humbling, a prompt to speculation. Is that her cruising pace? Could I ever be that fast? What kind of regimen would it take, what kind of training? How many miles do they do a week? How long have they been at it? What does their life look like, woven through that level of training?

I pondered it all, happily running along, as I was left in the dust.

And then, five minutes later, I passed her. Because she was walking.

Training for speed over distance often involves interval work. You push hard, then you slow to a jog or walk, then you push again. In my mind, this other runner was doing the same thing I was: out for a long, slow run, training endurance. Instead she was doing speed work!

When we discuss the ups and downs of publishing we often say, "run your own race." You can drive yourself mad comparing deal sizes, time to debut, daily wordcount, quantity of hot fan-art, social media attention, apparent lifestyle, general sangfroid. But in that moment, passing the marathoner, I realized the bromide doesn’t go nearly far enough, because it implies that we're all running the same race.

And we're not. Of course we're not. Yes, publishing is a roulette wheel. But also: Ted Chiang is not running the same race as I am! (Thank God.) I'm not running the same race as someone without kids; I'm also not running the same race as someone with three kids, or kids and aging parents to care for, or a full-time job, or a chronic condition, or all of the above.

I'm not running the same race as someone who wants to publish one perfect novel once every eight years. I also probably wouldn't agree with that person as regards what constitutes a perfect novel! (I have been awed by subtly written compelling realism. I feel I'm operating in my sweet spot when the subtly written, compellingly realistic woman sitting next to you at the bar might be a cyborg werewolf with a katana. Not quite the same project as, I don't know, Virginia Woolf. Though maybe there's a Virginia Woolf cyborg werewolf story hiding in an archive somewhere. I wouldn't put it past her.)

There's a strong version of this argument that tends toward, comparison is meaningless, striving is meaningless, you're perfect already you beautiful starchild, and maybe that is what I'm saying at rock bottom but I'm a bit too conscious of how much work it takes to be good at something, or even just to be a decent human being, to quite lean into the no-striving message—though I do believe that most of us are trying to do the best we can under the circumstances and maybe even a bit more than that, and are worthy of respect and consideration.

I'm making a far more limited claim: that it's harder to find a direct comparison than you might think, and even when you think you've found one, you're probably wrong—and when your brain’s certain that person on Instagram is a meaningful direct comparison, well, it’s definitely wrong. The guy who won the Boston Marathon this year has a marathon pace that's faster than my sprint. He's lived a very different life than I have: a different combination of circumstances, orientation in the world, desire, joy, and determination. But still: he can run 26 miles at my "sending it at the end of a 5k workout" pace! There's an operating tension here: between, on the one hand, not getting down on yourself for how well you’re running the ‘you’ event by comparing yourself to some other guy in some other event, and on the other, not losing the capacity for wonder and joy at what another person’s success proves to be possible.

A few minutes after I passed the marathoner, she zipped past me again, back at her intervals and utterly uncatchable. Man, what a stride!