The best runs are the ones we do not want to do.
My trainer said it so many times I stopped hearing it, right up until the moment I needed it. Five o’clock in the morning, January, Boston. My running pants froze overnight, so I stood in the kitchen using a hair dryer to defrost two stiff tubes of nylon, waiting for them to bend. Outside, sleet came in at a 45-degree angle, the kind that finds the gap between your hat and your collar. At that time in my life, 5 AM was an abominable idea. I went anyway, and his voice went with me, louder than the wind.
Running is not my love language. I founded an elite running club called SOLG, So Others Look Good, where the only membership requirement is being at peace with others finishing first. (A philosophy that translates poorly in the military.) I will neither confirm nor deny whether I ever rode the struggle bus during formation runs with the Marines.
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How I ended up on that cold, dark run was that a few years earlier a rare cancer had come very close to killing me. The doctors gave me a ten percent chance of seeing the first anniversary of my diagnosis. After outliving that, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society invited me to run the Boston Marathon as one of their honored patients, and I said yes because, why not? It seemed like a good idea at the time.
I was deep in my YOLO years. Climbing Mount Everest was off the bucket list (don’t know what I was thinking to put it on there in the first place), and I figured I had exactly one marathon in me, so it might as well be THE marathon. (I ended up doing two, for reasons I still do not quite understand.) The trainer came with the deal.
In 1999, a runner’s pace time lived on a computer chip laced to our shoe, read by a mat at every mile marker. A volunteer crew pulled up these mats on a schedule, timed so the twenty-sixth one came up exactly six hours after the start. For every one of those miles the van was just behind me, patient as a hearse, and thanks to a power greater than myself, I stayed a few strides ahead of it.
To this day I have no idea what my time was. I know it was under six hours because I crossed the finish line and somebody hung a finisher’s medal around my neck.
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At some point, all of us find ourselves in a race we did not choose. That phone call rearranges the year, if not a life. Somebody we love heads down a road we would do anything to stop them from going down, though the most we get to do is walk the curb beside them and wave. A long career hits its final stretch and the finish line we can finally see turns out to be at the end of the hardest mile yet.
An old spiritual recently showed up in my inner soundtrack. It’s been humming itself at all hours, in the shower, entering the rotary, in the middle of meetings while I am trying to pay attention. Guide my feet while I run this race, for I don’t want to run this race in vain. I love how little it asks for. Just guided feet. That’s it.
Isaiah promises that those who wait for the Lord “shall run and not be weary” (Isaiah 40:31). I believe him, though even the prophets can’t convince me that running feels like anything else but running.
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I didn’t want to write this week. But then I remembered the bit about the best runs…and thought maybe someone reading this might be standing in that kitchen right now, not wanting to go out…
Can’t tell you how long it takes to thaw pants. Pants eventually bend, though. And then we go out the door into the sideways sleet, and that power greater than ourselves is waiting to guide our feet.
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