On Being Mediocre at Hard Things

After a year of turmoil and struggles in the startup world, I started a new role at a big company in early 2024, which meant I once again had the mental space to pursue personal interests this year.

On the technical side, I worked on my data visualisation tool and wrote about it on this blog. On the non-technical side, I took on two new hobbies: long-distance running and chess.

Numbers

While somewhat unrelated at first glance, the common denominator between running and chess is that your progress is measurable and easily trackable, and that you have full accountability over the results. Luck plays a very small role in running and chess compared to team sports or other types of games of skill that I had dabbled in. I signed up on Chess.com and reinstalled Strava on my phone after I accepted the job offer in February, and eventually it felt natural to me that I worked towards a certain goal for each. After all, I liked optimising metrics.

Around 8 months ago, I set myself to run a full marathon in 4 hours ¹ and to reach a 1000 rating on Chess.com ² by the end of the year. As of writing, I have achieved the goal for chess and fell short for running. My Chess.com profile shows I’ve played 865 games of Rapid Chess ³ in the past year with a peak rating of 1082 on the 17th of December, which puts me at around the 85th percentile on the platform. During this span, I won 446 games, drew 33, and lost 386. For running, I’ve recorded 60 runs for a total of 577 kilometers (358 miles) and I completed the Taipei Marathon two weeks ago with a personal net time of 4 hours, 11 minutes and 6 seconds, which is around the 54th percentile for the finishing time for males ⁴.

Approach

Those results are in line with my expectations based on the rates of progression from practices throughout the year, although it was much easier to form these expectations for chess as it had a much faster iteration cycle.

For marathon training, I did one long run every weekend with the distance progressively increasing from 10 km to 31 km, with occasional weekday runs between 5 and 10 kilometers. I initially suffered back pains after long runs, which then slowly went away after I started core strength training with planks. I also discovered r/Marathon_Training a few months before the race, which was helpful for learning fueling strategies and what to expect of the unknown distance, which for me was the last 11 kilometers. I can now confirm the conventional wisdom from this subreddit: a full marathon can be split into two halves - the first 32 km and the last 10 (or the first 20 miles and the last 6.2).

Chess, on the other hand, was much easier to progress and the overall mental burden was lower. After picking up the basics, I have exclusively played variations of The London System as White and King’s Indian Defence as Black, and used Chess.com’s Game Review functionality to look back on my games and watched GothamChess to learn principles and openings. As a side note, chess’s popularity exploded during COVID thanks to a combination of people staying at home and the release of Queen’s Gambit on Netflix, and while the online resources are truly wonderful, there’s lots of drama and gossip entertainment as competitive chess is a unique sport where the world’s top players are chronically online and active in the streaming space.

Am I good enough?

Long-distance running and chess are generally hard hobbies to get into, in that the initial learning curve is steep where lots of people drop off. Like language learning, you feel like you’re venturing into a new world and learning a lot at first, and then there’s a phase of plateau where you have to keep practicing consistently to get into the intermediate level. Once you get past it, however, there are lots of people who are very good, and it’s objectively clear that they’re very good.

The visibility of people who are very good often makes you question why you should pursue it at all, especially if you have a competitive personality like myself. It is obviously unreasonable to think that you can be decent at something you started less than a year ago, but I had to develop a sense of patience to limit the comparison within versions of myself and not with others. Accepting mediocrity, both internally and externally, was a sign of maturity that helped me focus on the trajectory and not the current state.

Eventually, I started to appreciate the non-competitive aspects of these activities. Playing speed chess during odd hours of the day made me better at quickly switching my brain into a problem-solving mode under time pressure, which was a nice continuation from practicing for coding interviews earlier this year.

Running requires very little gear compared to other sports, meaning that there’s basically no constraints on locations. This added another aspect to my travels. Exploring new places on foot makes you feel like you belong in that new environment and allows you to see places a tourist might not. Apart from my usual runs in Victoria Park in London, I also went running in Innsbruck, Munich, Zurich, Naples, Kyoto, and Tokyo, and came back with a better sense of the geography each time.

The year ahead

Next year, I’m planning to get back into basketball where the goal is to play for a local amateur team and get some playing time. Another goal is to do a 5 km run in 20 minutes, which is practically a new sport. Unlike marathons which I can realistically attempt once or twice a year, I can aim for my personal best on a random weekday morning, and I’m excited to see how fast I can go.