Curiosity has a way of getting us places that we'd never thought we'd be (like, say, the moon). There's always something further, something more complicated, or something tougher -- and if there's a way to figure it out, humans tend to do just that. The scale of our curiosity and the lengths to which we'll go to satiate it are often staggering; go on a cruise and look out into the ocean at night -- then realize that some crazy-ass Spaniards crossed oceans in sailboats just to figure out what there was on the other side of the pond (or where the other side of the pond really was). This same sort of curiosity often is manifested in runners -- we wonder how much faster or further we could run, what sort of arbitrary barriers we can break.

Imagination is a close relative of curiosity. While curiosity has gotten the best of numerous cats, imagination has likely driven far more mad. Often, imagination is what happens after a curious thought -- i.e. 'I wonder what it's like to run a marathon? (this is curiosity) … Oh I bet it's like _____ (this is imagination)'. Imagination by itself is often fairly benign, resulting in fantasizing about a burrito or some straight-up fantastical thoughts with no basis in reality (in Russian daydream, burrito eats you). We start to get ourselves in trouble when we imagine things that may be, perhaps setting ourselves up to fail or imposing an unfair set of expectations onto others. I'll get to negative implications of imagination in the context of running in a bit, but first there's one more topic that ought to be brought into the mix before getting there:

Ego.

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