A few days ago, I went out for a run on the bike trail We are quite fortunate in upstate New York to have a paved, relatively flat place to run for miles and miles. However, there was a certain amount of anxiety that went along with that run. First of all, my last two running events I found myself with runners that were faster than me and Iballowed myself to marinate in the ooze of self doubt that goes with feeling like I cannot keep up, certainly an old emotion I wear as comfortably as an old sweatshirt. Then, there was the fact that with my broken hip last year I will not run outside in the winter and therefore, I have spent months under the comfortable glow of the orange lights of Orangetheory on the cushioned treadmill running my base, push and all out with the best of them. After two years of training there, this has become my comfort zone.
Unfortunately, my next race is none of these things. The race's name in and of itself would indicate it probably is not time to settle into my comfortable training. The Spartan Beast. It is long...12-18 miles. It is hot, West Virginia in the summer, and it is definitely not the cushioned belt of the treadmill I had allowed myself to grow accustomed to. It will be anything but flat as I am facing the Appalachian mountains of southern West Virginia. So, off I went, trekking it down the bike trail after my Orangetheory class of all inclines, determined to push my daily workout time to more than an hour if I was going to be race ready. OK. It was an epic fail. First, I ran too fast out of the gate. I checked my pace on my Apple Watch and was hovering near a 9 minute mile. I had the triumphant moment that those people I ran with really were not faster than me, I was faster than them. See? I was doing it. Yeah, that is until I couldn't. Stop. Walk. Try again. Too fast. Too Slow. Walking. Heart rate all over the place. Yep. It was 2.5 miles of epic fail, and complete and utter frustration as I just could not seem to find my groove that day.
Enter yesterday. I had worked 4 of 5 night shifts. It was hot. I was tired. I had made the mistake of taking my own advice. I usually advise my clients to tell a buddy before doing a workout they really don't feel like doing. That way someone is waiting at the other side and that notion is usually enough for them to do it anyway. Yep, I had told three people I would go for a long run on the trail today. What was I thinking? Now I really hated the trail. Hated the run. Hated the whole damn process. I drove to the trail trying to get a plan in my head. I would settle in to a 10:30 pace and see how far I could get. It was 88 degrees with a real feel of 94. I prehydrated and off I went. To me, it felt painfully slow. I was nowhere near as fast as my team, now it just felt worse. The wind pushed back at me and the sweat ran into my eyes. The sun made things hotter, yet I kept going. In those moments, when the pace seems ridiculously slow however, you begin to notice things. The lily pads are taking over the Mowhawk Hudson this time of year to where the water looks totally green. The bunnies scatter away from the trail when they feel your footsteps, ducking into the trees, and the grass around the trail smelled as if it had recently been cut.
Pretty soon, I would feel the vibration of my watch. I had made a mile. I was fine. One mile turned into two, and following that, I started into the third mile when I found myself facing a sign that said,"Town of Colonie". It dawned on me in that moment I had ran to a whole other city. Something I had never done before. Maybe it was only 2.25 miles but a whole other city sounded victorious to me. Besides I had never run this far down on the bike trail. I had usually given up long before afraid to venture too far. From here, I started to make my way back to the car, switching to interval runs from there for a total of 4.5 miles in order to better prepare to run obstacle to obstacle. I would have thought the wind would now be at my back since I had turned around. No such luck. Nonetheless, the run became much less of an epic disaster.
I suppose anyone who knows me well would not exactly describe me as a patient person. In fact, I tend to be a wee bit on the impatient side. Members of my family may argue that "wee bit" descriptor, but since I have control of this blog my story is "wee bit" and I am sticking to it. Nonetheless, I like to get things done and generally do not like to wait for things. I would guess that this is why I am always faced with this same old dilemma. I had once read that our greatest weaknesses are usually met with the repeated opportunity to face them. For me, being impatient by nature means I am presented with the opportunity to learn patience over and over and over again. Years of infertility, followed by two Russian adoptions which were complicated and arduous, and a Haitian adoption that took three years to finally have my family complete with five children. Then there was the ability to live a healthy lifestyle which took decades as my impatience had me attempt quick fix after quick fix, when the reality was it took about two years, eating real food, hard work and patiently giving myself a break from time to time.
As I look back on that 4.5 mile journey of yesterday, I realize that forcing myself to be patient in the pace that I fought so hard against, feeling as though I was somehow behind, actually allowed me to see things I never noticed the other day during my failure run, the same way I have seen things in myself on this health journey I never saw before when I went racing from quick fix to quick fix. I began to wonder how many times we all push through things just to get done only to find we have missed the joy of the journey, missed the lessons intended to be learned and more importantly fallen very short of our goals. In those failures, we miss a lot of warm sunshine, lilly pads, scurrying bunnies and most importantly the arrival to whole new destinations.
