Relearning Mediocrity

Ayushmaan Mishra

I have a spreadsheet with a row in it for a nine-kilometre run on the 17th of May, 2026. The distance is filled in. The duration says 0:00:00.

It is the last row in the sheet.

I did not run that day, or the day after, or for most of the month that followed. The number stayed there. It is still there now. A run I intended and never took, sitting at the bottom of a document I built with great care and then abandoned.

We all have a lot of these.

We are very good at building things. But not so much at maintaining them.

We decide to do something and arrive at it fully formed. Within a week there is a system, a structure, a spreadsheet with reasoning columns and innovative cross sheet dependencies.

Nobody asks us to write that. Nobody reads it. We do it because that is what we do.

Then something ordinary happens- We pull an oblique muscle on a tempo run and the whole thing stops.

Because there is no smaller version to fall back to. We never design one. We never think we would need it. The programme assumes a version of us that is perfect, but that version exists in bursts, and the bursts are always four to six weeks long.

I have always dreaded the word

I am keeping it anyway.

Not because I cannot be excellent ; the excellence is the least interesting thing about me. I have never once had to wonder whether I could rise.

So: mediocre.

Deliberately. As a discipline.

Excellence is loud. It pays you back every session. Mediocrity pays nothing. You run a 1k slowly and nobody claps. You put fifteen kilos on the bar when twenty is sitting right there and you know you could lift it, and you feel small, and you do it again on Wednesday, and again in September, and again in December.

That is the prize. That is the whole prize. It is unglamorous, and it is the only one that keeps you alive.

Sunday

Two loops of Lodhi Garden. Four point nine kilometres at 8:58 a kilometre, which for me is easy, unremarkable. There was a third loop available. My legs were fine. The morning was fine.

I went home instead.

It is the least impressive run I have ever logged, and it is the only one I am actually proud of.

Ayushmaan Mishra