It’s all fun and games until you have to run 10 miles. Alone. In 9,000 percent humidity. And the life lessons you were so proud of gleaning a couple weeks ago start to feel less like little pearls of wisdom and more like little pebbles in your shoe, vexing you more with each sweaty, exhausted step.

I’ll back up.

A few weeks ago I committed to learning a new life lesson from each of my 16 weeks of marathon training. I shared my first five in an earlier column, hoping they’d resonate with some of you since they aren’t really about running as much as they’re about perspective and persevering and gratitude.

Then the 10-mile training run arrived. And thanks to scheduling conflicts and family obligations, I had to tackle it without my daughter or our weekly training group.

After mile 5, when I decided to swear off running forever, and mile 7, when I stopped trusting my ability to make good life choices, and mile 9, when I started fantasizing about a minor injury that would allow me to bow out of this whole godforsaken ordeal, the lesson finally hit me.

I was nursing my sore back and bruised ego, thinking, “How in the world am I going to run 26 miles if I can’t run 10?” when I remembered being 30 years old and equally exhausted. Only that time I was holding a crying newborn and thinking, “How in the world am I going to comfort a teenager if I can’t comfort a baby?”

And then I remembered what helped.

At some point, I realized I didn’t have to comfort a teenager that day. I had to comfort a baby that day. And by the time I had to comfort a teenager, I would know her better. I would know me better. I would have more practice, more confidence, more strength, more sleep, maybe.

And I decided my 10-mile training week’s lesson is this: Zoom in.

Narrow your focus to the thing in front of you. Not the thing a day or week or 16 years from now. You will not be the same person in a day or a week or 16 years. You will have more practice, more confidence, more strength, more sleep, maybe.

I didn’t need to run 26 miles that day. I needed to run 10. And I did. And by the time I have to run 26, I’ll have more practice, more confidence, more strength, more sleep, maybe. I’ll know me better.

I decided to run this by John Duffy, clinical psychologist and author of “Parenting the New Teen in the Age of Anxiety.” He’s also training for the Chicago Marathon. He is, in fact, the reason I ran in 2023. (“You have to,” he told me. “You’ll hate it. It will change your life.” All true.)

I wanted to know if my zoom-in approach makes any sense, applied to real-life.

Turns out he uses it with clients all the time.

“I work with this college kid who thinks he has a gambling addiction,” he told me. “We discovered over a little time that he’s actually focused on the scarcity of money in his life.”

By zooming in.

“We broke it down,” he said, “ ‘You’re making about $5,000 this summer. That’s what you need right now. It’s plenty. Five years from now, you’ll probably need more. And with your major and an internship or two, life is set up so you’ll have more. So let’s just focus on what you need now.”

Young people have a hard time zooming in, he said. They've been trained — maybe by their parents, maybe by their coaches, maybe by the culture — to think a setback is a sentence. A verdict. A point of no return.

“They need to hear, ‘This is a process. We’re making mistakes and we’re learning from them and we’re getting wiser as we go. It’s a training plan.”

Often he’ll ask kids to talk about something they’re good at. And often they’ll struggle, thinking he’s trying to nail them down on a major. Thinking he’s giving them an aptitude test.

“I have to say, ‘Oh, we’re not talking career,’” he said. “I want to hear about the guitar hanging in your room. Or how much you like to write fiction. I want to know what’s remarkable about you.' And I have yet to run into a kid who isn’t remarkable.”

Zoom in on that.

This works for parents as well, who typically arrive in his office in an anxious state. (He is, after all, a therapist.) Almost without fail, he tells them to zoom in.

“Parent your kid for today,” he said. “You don’t have to prep for the whole big picture. Thinking way beyond today will drive up anxiety, and that trickles right down to your kid.”

Their future matters. Your future matters. But you're both still in training. The future isn’t here yet. And when it arrives, you'll both have more practice, more confidence, more strength, more sleep.

“That’s what parenting is, right?” Duffy said. “It’s training your kid to be a good human.”

Some days are hard. You can't imagine how you'll do an even harder one. But you will.

“A lot of kids — and parents — carry this narrative that they're supposed to be ideal, that things have to go perfectly,’” Duffy said. “I tell them, ‘Oh, that is absolutely, 100 percent not going to happen. You can liberate yourself from that right now.’

"And that’s the beauty of it, right? It’s OK to have a bad day," he said. "It’s OK to rack up these little defeats, along with some victories. It’s jagged, and it’s supposed to be.”

Because you're in training. And you'll get stronger as you go.

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