'Frustration is to be sought out and savored, not avoided'

Thoughts on what it's like to work on getting better as a runner

When I was a teenager, I fell in love with the music of Bob Dylan. I listened to scratchy old albums of his and watched grainy footage from the single documentary of his early years I could find (1967’s Don’t Look Back) in a single-minded pursuit to learn how to play the guitar like he did.

One Christmas, my parents gave me an acoustic guitar of my own, …