Honesty

Monday, July 30

A day of rest might be a dangerous thing. Time to think about something besides running or, worse yet, start making analogies between running and the rest of my life.

So what I'm thinking about is honesty. With yourself. With others. When I started running, I quickly realized that I was going to give up and quit again this time unless I was willing to be honest with myself, about myself. Honest about the fact that I couldn't run very fast. In fact I was probably barely jogging. Honest about how lazy I was. Honest about how much fear I felt about taking on a longer distance or trying for a faster time. That's dangerous ground for me; it was more so in those days. Days when I felt unwanted by someone I loved. Days when I was told I was a failure at work; when I knew I was being punished for standing up for what was right. Not a great time to take a good hard look inside!

Still I decided to be honest with myself about this one lousy race. I ran slow, but I ran; I kicked my own lazy ass out the door, but I went; I knew there was no way I could keep running X minutes, but I started anyway - and eventually I ran faster, built some discipline and (horrors!) really wanted to run, increased my distance. Did my very first, 11-min-mile 10K with 55,000 other people and got my t-shirt.

Why do we lie about anything? To get to the end we want without having to actually walk the path? To pretend we are something we really aren't?

Not sure what I'm rambling about - and if this is some analogy, it's a bad one. I live with a screwed-up, messy self, hopefully with a little honesty in there somewhere.