sunday's mileage: 3.5
on the iPod: "water" -- brad paisley
This Memorial Day weekend has found me, for the first time in quite a while, with no calendar. No registrations. Or bibs. No races with which to prepare. While I can't say that i'm exactly comfortable not having any pending events, I know that it's only a matter of time before an opportunity will present itself and i'll once again feel the excitement and healthy anxiousness that being amongst runners on a cool, weekend morning creates in my existence. But for now, that feeling isn't there. It will come back.
Don't think for a single moment, however, that having no races on the calendar is stopping me from distance runs. It's only changed them. Gone, for now, are the attention to detail that comes with training for a half or full marathon. I don't worry so much about drinking whey protein shakes every morning and eating grilled chicken for dinner. I don't have to think in advance about which running shorts and shirt i'm going to wear (yeah, i'll admit it, I think about sh*t like that). I'm not bound by a starting time. I don't have to thinking about going to the bathroom. I can simply run for the sake of running.
When Mrs. Murie, my most outstanding running friend who is deep in the throws of training for her 9th marathon mentioned a long run for this weekend, I immediately accepted her offer. I got crazy excited. That simple gesture created a chemical response in my sympathetic nervous system, pumping endorphins and dopamine through my neural pathways and bloodstream. I was looking forward to it all week. But there was also a tinge of jealousy that I felt as Wednesday creeped into Thursday, and Thursday rolled around to Friday, getting closer and closer to Saturday morning. I was jealous that Mrs. Murie would soon be racing, soon be encapsulated within thousands of souls who have come together from all walks of life to go the distance. And what made it worse, bless her heart, is that she had been, for weeks, encouraging me to come along and run the half-marathon of the event, something I would love to do, but can't get away because of teaching summer school. What the hell was I thinking when I signed up for that?? I clearly wasn't.
Saturday morning arrived, and, like so many late Spring mornings in Fayetteville, Arkansas, was amazingly gorgeous outside. I was up early, 6:15ish, and ready to go. But Mrs. Murie loves her beauty sleep, so I would have to wait until our scheduled meeting time of 8:15. No worries however, as it made time for possibly my second favorite activity behind running: coffee and the newspaper. I drink coffee seven mornings a week, almost always reading two thirds of the paper while embibing. Mornings, whether a running morning or not, are my favorite time of the day.
We soon enough met up and headed out, keeping a fairly speedy clip from the onset. Mrs. Murie is light years ahead of me in terms of running and athletic ability. I've come to appreciate the fact that I know when we go out together i'm going to be pushed physically to my limits. She never disappoints, and I hope that these miles i'm logging with her are increasing my own speed. I think they are. But more rewarding than the speed work are the conversations that we have and the emotions that we share while laced up.
Sometimes talking while running can be extremely difficult, particularly in the latter miles, as breathing becomes labored. But it never fails that we share our lives and thoughts with each other as we run. Of course we cover the banal goings on of our lives: teaching, weekend plans, music (a shared love for Indigo Girls), television; but we almost always gravitate toward larger thoughts: faith, love, family, compassion. I love these conversations. I look forward to them. And while I don't know for sure that Mrs. Murie shares this sentiment, I can say with no reservations that she is one of the blessings in my life. I've got a lot of those.
The conversations and dialogues that Mrs. Murie and I have help me sort through my life. They help me make sense of the things that don't make sense. Looking back introspectively, I can very easily recognize that i've always been, primarily, alone. This is where it gets weird: I've always been surrounded with the best family I can imagine, always had a small group of great friends and coworkers (Mrs. Pugh!), always spent time in a great church; but i've also pretty much been alone. And I adapted to telling myself that I was comfortable with it. For so many years, the goal was to protect myself, to blend in and try to be as much like everybody else as possible. To not be who I was. I now realize how incredibly unhealthy that strategy was. A sizeable portion of those thoughts disappeared when I started running, but some of them still linger today. I want to get away from them completely.
I would love to have somebody in my life to share experiences, and Mrs. Murie and I talked quite a bit about it on our run. She had some great things to say about this, and reminded me to stay grounded in the good things that I have in life, which are abundant. She also told me I should be proactive about everything. That's good advice. I think i'll always be comfortable by myself, choosing to do things that are solitary in nature. It's not lost on me that running is, in it's nature, not a team sport. It fits me perfectly.
But i'd love nothing more than to come home every day to another person. To talk. To laugh. To share meals. To have contact. But mostly just to simply care. I hope I find him sooner than later. I hope that he's looking for me, too. In the meantime, running fills the void. And how lucky I am to be able to do what I love so much with such amazing people like Mrs. Murie and Mrs. Pugh, and the other people in my life that both run and don't. How lucky.
Run.
No comments:
Post a Comment