“Running is not about how far you go, but how far you’ve come.” - Bart Yasso
Twenty years ago, I failed at running my first 5k. Sure I finished, but by my account (and probably some others as well), it was a failure. It took me 14 years to overcome that failure and sign up for another race.
And just this fall, I succeeded at finishing my first 50k Ultra Marathon.
My twenty-year running journey started at the beginning of June 2003, just before I started dating my now husband, and about two months prior to when I moved to Washington, D.C. to start my career. Coincidence? Maybe…
“Have you always been a runner?”
I get this question a lot. I think that people see the races and distances I am running and assume that I ran in high school and college and have continued into adulthood. But the answer is an unequivocal “No.”
There are a lot of times when it was solidified in my young brain that I was a lot of things – but one of those things was never “athlete.”
I was in the marching band, I got good grades, I sang, but I did not do sports. My only hope in school when the class was split to play softball or kickball was that I could be a captain, so I wasn’t picked last.
Be that as it may, I also have an unhealthy amount of self-efficacy. I’ll debate in a later post whether this is nature or nurture, but the long and short of it is that when I had the opportunity in 2003 to join colleagues for the Race for the Cure 5k in DC, I thought, “how hard can it be?”
How hard can it be? It was an epic disaster. I didn’t know how to train, I didn’t actually know any other runners who could help me, I didn’t really know how to ask for help. My training consisted of running a couple days a week from my apartment down the block and back. I had no idea what that distance was at the time. (I’ve since looked it up - It was less than half a mile.)
My hubris got in the way and the result was that I could not walk the next day.
I think that I ate an entire humble pie by myself that day. So much so that I did not lace up my running shoes for another seven years (did I even have running shoes then?). Remember, it would still be another seven years after that I would finally digest that humble pie enough to even consider signing up for another race.
Running was hard for me. Working up to a 5k when I finally did it in a way that worked was still hard for me. And I am so glad that I kept returning to this sport. I have gained so much more wisdom about myself, as a runner, a leader and about what’s important in life than I could have ever imagined was possible.