By that point, I was ten months into my weight loss journey, and only 6 months into my Orangetheory Training and I suppose by then I could wear the term "jogger" loosely. Yes, I had lost 55 pounds by then, but my left hip hurt. I would find out many months later it was a stress fracture from the very activity I would try to do that day. I had not really run in weeks by then,"preparing". I had instead chosen the bike. With all of this worry, plus my history of gym class bullying due to my obesity and inability to keep up, I was a bit of a wreck at the start line. However, I took off with my son, Jack. My very patient trusty sidekick, who jogged at my slow pace and walked when the hills hurt too much to run on. We did it. It may not have been graceful or lightning fast but we did it. Just about the time I was frustrated with certain aspects of the run, and a bit shaken with the battle of the hip pain, I found my guy had posted this. When I look at this picture, I see all of the insecurities I wore at the time and recall the uncertainty of a hip that had honestly hurt for two months by then. However, these words would remind me I had made a promise to this guy when he left for college. This was a promise that I would finally get healthy, and he had become invested in supporting me through it. Time to press on.
To be honest, I had forgotten a lot of that until I was standing on that spot again today. This time, my hip didn't hurt, I had a titanium compression screw and a well healed fracture that took care of that. I was no longer a somewhat "jogger" at Orangetheory, I was teetering on the brink of "runner," and after doing a 20 mile Spartan in August I was pretty sure I could cover the distance. So, those aspects of today's race were covered. Now, to conquer one more fear. Once again, I was with runners that were faster than me. That proved to be mentally devastating at my last 5k in June as my irrational fear of being last, leftover from tough junior high and high school days, reared its ugly head. Today, I found myself pulling the other runners on my team aside and explaining to them, that me slowing them down was just my fear, and that the only one who cared about that was me, as they did not. They of course, laughed at me and once again said, the pace did not matter. We run together a lot and truly this did not need to be said. I think I was just trying to convince myself once again, simply running this 5k with my team mattered and nothing more.
As we took off in the sea of humanity, I found myself on a familiar course only, I was not the runner I was two years ago. I seemed to be running without pain. I took on the hills and pushed away the voices that love to tell me,"I can't" and did it anyway this time perhaps a bit more gracefully than the last time, as this time my running mates did not have to say,"you got this" even once. As I chatted with my team, we joked about this being an agility course as we found ourselves weaving in and out of the walls of walkers enjoying the sunny day and the excited crowd. We would find ourselves in color stations where the corn starch based color hung so heavy in the air, we could not see the runners a foot in front of us. We would laugh about having to call out to one another in the middle of a cloud of purple and would have to blow the dust off the sunglasses before we could get going again. It became obvious in the passing of two years, that although the course was familiar, my experience was all new. Fear and anxiety was replaced by laughter, and the hip pain replaced by the ability to run some hills.
Pretty soon, I would hear Jack say,"wait. What? We're done?" There it was, the finish, already. I found myself speeding up for a strong finish, with the voice of my favorite trainer playing in my head,"take it home guys. Take it home." Due to the crowded course it would take about 34 minutes for us. Not super speedy, but certainly a comfortable 5k for me. We would go on to join the after party that involved a lot of dancing, and color bombs for days.
I began to really reflect on the last two years. The agony of a broken leg with a long recovery, the unadulterated happiness associated with completing the 20 mile Spartan Beast and everything in between. I began to wonder what would have happened if someone told me when I started all of this, nearly three years ago, that it would take this long and be a winding road full of hills and battles. Would I say it was just too hard? I had given up many times in the past, why wouldn't I give up then? Three years. Devastating injury. Tough surgery. Hard recovery, and the uphill battle of the 85 pound weight loss staring me in the face, ready go. Knowing that up front probably would have made me believe that it was about as possible as seeing a mythical unicorn in Saratoga today. Yet, a total of nearly three years, a team of people not willing to let me fall, mostly my sidekick Jack, and I find myself learning a little more about myself with each passing race, and today embracing the pink, purple, yellow and blue culture with the best of them actually beginning to wonder what horned creature lived in the billows of color, proving that at times good health may seem as likely as a unicorn in Saratoga, but not impossible.
