I hate to break it to you, but progress isn’t linear. That nice straight line, tracking at 45 degrees across the graph… it doesn’t exist in reality.
The road of progress is full of bumps and obstacles. There are also dips in the road that will slow or halt your progression for a while. Accepting this reality is a huge step in changing our expectations of what our progress as runners ‘should' be like.
It’s a bit like looking at a graph of what the stock market is doing. You can look at it for the past hour, day, week, month, 3 months, year, 5 years or even 10 years. Each of these give a different perspective and some will give an interesting and sobering insight into where you really are right now and whether that dip is actually anything to be concerned about. More often than not, the obstacle that you look at on the 1 day view, is actually insignificant from a 1 year perspective.
What is more important is the overall trajectory, the bigger picture. Is your running tracking in the right direction, even with the lumps and bumps along the way. Are you now achieving things that 2 years ago you thought would have been impossible? Are you now enjoying your running more, with less pressure? A great example is Olympians, who deal in 4 year cycles. Some of them they have been to 5 Olympic games and in their cases, they can view each run session as contributing to a 20 year career puzzle. That's perspective.
Remember also that each runner will be caring about and measuring something different. Some will measure km’s per week, others will measure metres climbed, number of runs, time on legs, longest run, overall training load, fatigue levels, average pace and so on…... There are so many metrics that we can potentially measure, that comparison to other runners and their ‘graph’ is futile.
Accepting that your progress will not be linear and full of obstacles is a great start, then it’s a question of standing far enough back to really see your overall trajectory, which is what really matters.