When I look at the wall of my bedroom, which has now been plastered with three-and-a-half months worth of weekly training schedules, I’m reminded of something Jon said to me. “There’s always something.”

There’s always something that always gets in the way of sticking to our perfect, pre-determined schedule. We can’t control these somethings, but rather try to base our athletic seasons (and lives) on designing a system that is responsive to these unpredictable, but deeply influential, events – dubbed Black Swans by writer-philosopher Nassim Taleb.

I try to live in acceptance of these Black Swans. There’s a great Spanish proverb, “Si quieres hacer reir a Dios, cuèntale tus planes,” roughly translated to “If you want to make G-d laugh, tell Him your plans.” In athletics – as in life – plans are comforting. It’s important to have an idea of where you want to go and how you think you can get there. Though, while we may reach our initial goals, the route we end up following is seldom identical to the one originally laid out.

Despite my personal experience with the unexpected derailment of an athletic training plan (thanks to being mowed down by an impatient motorist a couple months ago), I still follow my training calendar. I’m more or less “back on track;” I’m still where I wanted to be on March 29. Athletics is unique in that we often can – with some variation from the original plan – achieve the same goals, despite a huge interruption from a Black Swan.

Yet, every time I look back at my own personal history, I see how Black Swans threw me onto an entirely new track every time I felt comfortable and thought I knew what I wanted. From contracting a nearly-fatal bone marrow disease as a six-year-old to picking up the guitar a decade later, to discovering running at seventeen, to discovering STRIVE in college, all of the most influential singular events (both positive and negative) that define me and my ambitions today were unplanned and unpredictable beforehand.  With this in mind, I tend to place less import on prediction and planning in life than in athletics.

In athletics, we avoid Black Swans. They manifest themselves as interruptions from which we attempt to recover, to return to the track we had already laid out. While in life, a Black Swan can be positive or negative – say getting a great but unexpected job offer vs. the untimely death of a family member – in athletics, Black Swans are entirely negative. You don’t go from running 5’00 in the mile to 4’00 over-night, but you can go from running 4’00 to not running at all thanks to a broken ankle.

Thus, in running, the Black Swan doesn’t change our ambitions. It’s easy to set goals in athletics because (most) people want to improve. Particularly in running, the numeric nature of the sport makes this black-and-white. I want to run faster – whether that means finishing your first 5k or qualifying for an Olympic team. Black Swans may slow you down temporarily, but won’t remove the desire to get faster and set you on a totally new course.

Outside of athletics, we are surprisingly bad at establishing goals. We struggle to predict what we want – and are even worse at predicting what we’ll want tomorrow or next week or next year. Unlike running, in life, there is no singular, clear-cut definition of progress; improvement is subjective, multi-faceted, and multi-directional. Black Swans are not something from which we recover, from which we return to our predefined pursuit of a goal. They expose us to new goals we’d never considered.

In running, the Black Swan may force us to temporarily stray from a predetermined path, but it won’t change our goals or our idea of improvement. In real life, however, the Black Swan – for better or for worse – is more than just a delay or distraction on a preset path. It re-defines the goal and the path to take us there.