I used to do track in junior high. It was one of my very few outings into group sports, aside from a semi-disastrous stint in grade school basketball. I wasn’t all that great at track either: I was slow, so they put me in long-distance. I always wished I’d had better upper-body strength so they’d put me in shot-put or discus, especially when running my umpteenth lap around their practice area, my vision blurring and my lungs wheezing.

I had an epiphany one day during practice: even though I was exhausted, I could always focus on just putting on leg in front of the other, and I’d still keep moving forward (albeit at a snail’s pace). And so went most of my practices: eyes to the ground, just moving forward as best I could.

Yeah, it’s my latest metaphor for grad school. Did you see that coming about a mile (or 800 meters) away? One of those things they don’t tell you about grad school is that it is an emotional long-distance race. A 5-6 year one. There are little bursts of happiness: a good experimental result here, a nice weekend with the person you love there. But most of it, especially after the prelims, is just you trying to move yourself forward towards the end. You try to forget that actually the PhD isn’t the end: there are post-doc positions to take on. For now, though, you just keep your eyes to the ground and put one foot in front of the other. You don’t necessarily feel like you’re getting anywhere, and you CERTAINLY feel like everyone else has already finished and they are all enjoying their Gatorades, watching you falter.