Hi, I'm John Hill. I host 12 Months to Marathon—the running podcast for people over 35 with marathon dreams. Whether you are looking for a personal best or want to run a marathon, my story and regular tips should help you get there.
I didn't run my first marathon until I was 36. I ran my first sub-3 marathon at the age of 45. If I can do it, so can you!
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Are you actually a slow runner — or are you simply a runner who could improve your pace?
There’s a big difference.
In this episode of the 12 Months to Marathon Podcast, I explore the difference between a running performance problem and a running identity problem — and why the language you use about yourself could be holding you back.
We look at common statements such as:
“I am a slow runner.”
“I’m injury-prone.”
“I’ll never be able to run that pace.”
“I’m just not built for running.”
The problem isn't necessarily where your running is right now. The problem comes when your current performance becomes part of who you believe you are.
Your pace is data. Your race time is data. An injury is information. A difficult training session is feedback.
None of those things define you.
I also discuss comparison, running snobbery, social media, limiting beliefs and why wanting to become faster doesn't mean you have to stop celebrating where you are now.
You can accept your current performance while still wanting to improve it.
So rather than saying “I am a slow runner,” perhaps the better question is:
“What would I need to do to improve my pace?”
Because performance can be trained. Don't turn something you can change into an identity you feel you have to live with.
Hello, welcome to the Twelve Months to Marathon Podcast from me, John Hill, the running podcast for the over 35s with Marathon Dreams, episode 110, running performance versus running identity. So, what's going on with me at the moment? Well, I'm still in Poland on my uh sort of family holiday, and uh training's going really well. Training for high rocks, as you may know, if you're a regular listener, which is going really, really well, then I'm noticing the improvements. I'm also seeing a lot of the improvements from adding in additional rest according to my plan, which if you're a seasoned runner, you know how difficult it is to have rest days. And I'm seeing the benefit of that, which is probably a podcast in itself, which I'll do. Now, I wanted to do this one just because I get comments, I get messages, I speak to my coaching clients, and it's a journey that I've been on personally if I'm going to be a little bit vulnerable with you. And there's a difference between performance and identity. Now, to give you a bit of background, about uh where are we? So, 13 or so years ago, I studied to be an NLP practitioner, which is neurolinguistic programming, which is a mode of coaching, basically. Uh, it's quite an interesting mode of coaching. There's some interesting concepts and approaches in there, and we don't want to get dogmatic with this stuff and say it's the only way to do things, but basically, neurolinguistic programming in simple terms, in layman's terms, is how you speak to yourself or how you communicate neuro like in the mind. So, and linguistics obviously is language. So, how you speak to yourself, and I think as runners, how we speak to ourselves is probably as important as anything else. Now, the reason why I mention NLP is because one of the fundamentals of NLP when you are dealing with another human being and when you're speaking to somebody, and this might help some parents out there, and this is really difficult to do, is we should be attacking the performance and we shouldn't be attacking the person. Let me repeat that we should be attacking the performance, we shouldn't be attacking the person. And what that basically means is that you can criticize somebody's performance and actually go to town on somebody's performance, but you should never make it personal. Now, I'm gonna give you a relevant example here, which I've noticed over the last couple of years. So, those of you who've listened to this for a while or know me know that my background is primarily in weight loss coaching and also losing weight myself. So, 21 years ago, as I record this, uh I lost £70, 30 odd kilos, five stone in in in UK terms, and I've kept it up ever since, which led me on my journey. We won't go into that story, told it numerous times. And one thing I noticed over the last few years is that people would take what in essence is a physical problem and turn it into a personal problem. Now, when I lost all my weight, one of the things that I did, the first thing I arguably that I did was separate my person, me personally, from my physical state. So it was like, well, I see myself as the fat kid. That's an identity problem. Yes? Losing weight is not an identity problem, it's a physical problem. Now, things like rates and all that, and where it goes from and all the all the actual mechanics of it, that's not the issue here. What we're talking about here are the fundamentals, the principles. And if we lose context on principles, we lose context of everything. So what's happened recently, and I won't go into the reasons potentially for this because it moves into ideology and all that sort of stuff, is we if we make something personal, we create a barrier, which means we can't we we don't want people to criticize us on a performance level. Example, you're not a bad person if you're overweight, okay, but you're still overweight, okay. If you make yourself a bad person, that's a different thing. Or if someone criticizes you personally, like I'll use this example because it's it's the history, and I've been there myself, and I'll I'll bring it back to ruling for you in a second, but it just helps you make the point. So here's an example. Um, you go and see a doctor, doctor says, Hello, so and so, your BMI is currently this, which might put you in the overweight or obese category. That's a factual statement about your physical state. Okay. If you take that personally, that's your problem. If the doctor said you are a bad person because your BMI is blah, blah, blah, then what the doctor is doing is making it about you as a person, right? Where the miscommunication or where the problems happen is where somebody says that's fact shaming when it's not. Yeah. Like for example, obesity, I think, is the second leading cause of some cancers worldwide, and people will say that's fact shaming. Well, it's not, it's a factual statement. Okay. It's a bit like saying, um, you know, the number one cause of cancer is smoking. It's and like someone who smoked for 50 years turning around and going, Well, I'm offended by that. Well, you can be offended by it, but the facts are statistically, if you smoke for a long period of time, you increase your risks of getting certain illnesses. And that's just the facts. And we shouldn't be scared of talking about the facts when we're presenting them as facts, not as personal. Okay, which is a long-winded, basically, way of saying that we have to be able to separate the facts, performance, from us as people. Yeah. Let's bring it back to running, a hill that I am dying on every day. I am a slow runner. Okay. I am a slow runner is an identity statement. I want to improve my pace is a performance statement. I am a slow runner is an identity statement. Now that could be factually true, but the problem with the statement I am a slow runner is the metrics you're basing that on. Because who are you slow compared to? Because compared to Sebastian Soare, we're all slow compared to um Eunice Kil Kajika. If apologies on the pronunciation, there, the guy who finished second base in the marathon, who's just broke the half marathon world record, um, we're all slow compared to him. Okay. So what I am is an identity statement. Okay. So when people say I am a slow runner, I am slow, what they're not, they're not saying I am slow, but I want to improve. Most people are saying I am slow, thus, this becomes my identity. I can only do this. Another example, I am injury prone. That's an identity statement. I suffer recurring injuries is not an identity statement, it's very subtle. But if you keep telling yourself I am, then it becomes an identity. And what it does is it stifles your ability to get better at running, okay? Because you can get better at running. So I've been guilty of this in other areas of my life because what we want to try and do is we want to try and give ourselves the opportunity to improve without condemning ourselves. Okay, so for example, there are areas in my running performance that I would like to improve on, you don't need to condemn yourself, and you certainly don't need to say I am a slow runner or I am this or I am that because these are identity statements, and the problem is that if we keep using the identity statements, what we risk is then feeling bad if we want to improve. Okay. Now I've talked about slow running snobbery a lot, and it's something I've noticed just in the sense of that I want my feed on social media full of people who I vibe with, yeah. And a lot of people that I vibe with are people who are starting their journey, okay. I don't really vibe with like a 240 marathon runner, okay? Nothing wrong with that, brilliant, but that's not really who I want to vibe with because for me, they're already quite they're already competent as a runner, so they don't really need a lot of potential help in in what the way I see. I see, this is only my opinion, that's a difficult thing to do, but I see the start of the journey is slightly more difficult because there are a number of psychological barriers that are added into the new runner. Okay, and one of those things being a lot of identity stuff. I am overweight and I want to be a runner. So that there's a a problem there. It's like it's almost like a cauldron of psychological barriers. So you've got the fact that you're overweight, you're new, you're out of breath, you struggle. All these things that you have to go through to become better as a runner, you have to go through. So I like supporting those people. What that doesn't mean is like slow running snobbery is basically where we we dislike faster runners. That's as bad as not liking slower runners. And I don't want to go down that tangent again. But with that problem, is if you keep where that becomes a problem is like if you want to improve, you then break out of that sort of club, as it were. Is that a good or a bad thing? Because you, you know, you feel like, oh well, is it okay for me to want to improve? Is it okay for me to want to improve on marathon time or perhaps push myself a little bit further? And the answer to that question is yes, of course it is. You can do whatever you want, but the problem is now because everything's so public and we feel like we've got to make everything public, it then creates additional barriers for us, and then it can compound those psychological issues that I mentioned because comparison is the thief of joy. Now, I did a video on this this morning, oddly, as I record this on Instagram, because I think people spend far too much time on social media and then blame social media for problems they encounter. I use the example of people moaning about adverts on Instagram. You're on Instagram, it makes trillions a year from advertising revenue. It's an advertising platform. That's just what happens. Another example I use this morning, which does make me chuck, is when people complain about a bot replying to them when they message a big company. It's 2026. What are you expecting? Do you whether you agree with that or not is a different argument, but that's the way things are. So when we spend too much time on social media, it does fuel that comparison thing, okay? And that comparison thing can then make us feel bad about ourselves, which then drives us to this identity problem versus a performance problem because you can get better at running. Now, what you might find is you hit a natural limit. I'll give you an example. I'm 49. Now I can do some pretty cool stuff, but because I make the wrong comparisons, sometimes I beat myself up. Like I did a workout this morning, which I won't discuss because it's irrelevant in terms of listeners, but I did a workout this morning and finished it. I thought, do you know what? That was quite hard. And 28-year-old me couldn't have done that. So 20 years ago, I couldn't have done that, but now I can. So you've got to put some context on things. And it's like, well, actually, that shows that with rest and recovery, and you know, all these things that we have to do around what we do, depending on where you are, at what station in life you're at, you can improve, and it's okay to want to improve. But if you start making identity statements, I am a slow runner, I will always be a slow runner, I am injury prone, I'm never going to be able to do this, then those become beliefs. Sorry, those become beliefs are just thoughts you keep thinking. And if you believe something about yourself which necessarily isn't true, then you're going to perhaps hamper your ability to get better. Okay. And you've got to learn the difference between personal and physical or factual performance. Yeah, it's really important. And it's something that I did kind of accidentally back in 2005 when I lost weight. I realized, hang on a minute, I'm seeing myself as this thing. Whereas if I see myself as different, I can become different, and I did. And then that then translates into other areas of life. We we take things personally which aren't meant to be personal unless they are directed at us personally. And let's be honest, going back to the overweight example, if you're overweight and someone attacks you as a person for being overweight, then would you want to associate with that person anyway? Because it's not a it's not a personality trait, it's a physical manifestation of behaviors and decisions. Your running performance is a physical manifestation of your decisions and your actions and your behaviors around running, which are trainable. Yeah. So I did a post on this the other day on Instagram, cheap plug at 12 months tomorrow and follow me over there, where I said that a performance issue is trainable and fixable. A identity issue is not that easy to fix because we don't know, we're not aware of them. We just say these things. But if it's not saying I am a slow runner to the problem, it's key you keep saying it to yourself and you believe it. So then when you try and get faster, your unconscious will go, Well, you keep telling me that I'm a slow runner. So how can I get faster if you keep telling me that I'm slow? Yeah, and that's really, really important. So as a coach, if you're a coach, listen to this or somebody else, think about that concept of go after the performance, never attack the person. It doesn't need to be personal because at the end of the day, how you feel about yourself is the most important thing. Yeah, nobody can tell you who or what you are, yeah, as a person, but you can get feedback on your performance, and sometimes that feedback can be quite harsh. That run wasn't good enough. That's not personal. If you take it personal, that's on you. That's a you problem, okay? And we have to separate those two things. So if you do want to improve as a runner, you have to see potentially where you are muddying the water between performance and personal, okay? And look out for those I am statements. No one's perfect here. I've done it this morning. Something happened to me this morning as I record this, where I was flipping into this is about me, and it wasn't, it was just a mechanical thing. And what I mean by mechanical, I mean it's just a process, yeah, like anything in life, like work, money, business, running, weight loss. These are just things that are fixable. Identity is a problem if you allow it to be. So look out for those I am statements, okay? And see if that's useful in making you get better and improve as a runner, okay? So thank you very much for listening as always. I do appreciate it. If you're new to the podcast, don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcast from, Apple or Spotify. If you're a regular listener, please take the time to drop me a quick review. It does really, really help me and share this with your friends. If you don't follow me on Instagram, hop on over there at 12 months to marathon for all your daily content and tips. And if you go to my link in my bio, you can join my free running community for the over 35s where we can take you away from the noise of social media and connect over there. Thanks again for listening. I appreciate it, and I'll speak to you all very soon indeed.
