This was also the summer one of my best friends and I decided it was time for us to get into shape. I was on Weight Watchers for the third time in my young life and thought maybe getting moving would get me closer to the ever elusive goal weight I had chased for so long. We would set out from the grade school we went to in our double knit polyester track suits, Kangaroos, and a Walkman that was so big, it required some sort of harness to stay in place while we ran. We were not great runners. We walked a lot, I was still heavy and usually I was just grateful for my much thinner friend who would not leave me behind. If memory serves, we had some idea of what we eventually wanted to be able to do from the beginning, in terms of running ability, but there was a problem. This was hard. Really hard. I wheezed when I ran, my body hurt, and those polyester track pants may have been fashion forward, but on obese touching thighs attempting to run, they lacked a bit in functionality. Ultimately for me it was simply easier to let life take over, pull back from the routine, and then stop all together. To be honest, this pattern would be the perfect metaphor for the attempts at being healthy that would consume the 25 years that followed.
I was thinking about those early runs last week as I had a client struggling with believing she could run any distance on her own. No amount of talking to her convinced her. The "I can't" was way stronger than the "Yes you can." I decided it was just time to take her running. I wanted her to see if I could do it, she could too. Besides, I train at Orangetheory with her all the time. I knew what she was capable of. It was her who didn't. As I headed into that day, it dawned on me, besides an organized race, I had not run outside the gym with another human being, besides my son, since the summer of '87. My history of running with others prior to that was limited to gym class where the ridicule ran deep and my confidence level was a firm zero, making this run almost as terrifying for me as she was saying it was for her.
Finally the day came for our run. We would hit up Lock 7, only for me, I had traded in my Swatch watch, my polyester double knit track pants, my Walkman harness and my Kangaroos for my trusty Apple Watch, Nike Dri Fit running shorts, a dri fit tank with my logo, a sleek neoprene arm band to house my iphone 10, and custom fit Brooks. Yes, I was ready and a far cry from 1987. As a side note, I cannot promise my play list was all that different though. My newbie settled into her pace quickly and I found I was running comfortably enough that I could still point out landmarks, help her to count steps and breathe, and essentially work the whole mental side of endurance running. Yes, this was going well. She did not even stop to walk. I guess in the 30 years that have passed I have gotten better at this running thing, and honestly having someone along really was not all that bad.
Pretty soon I would see the yellow pole. I love that yellow pole. It sticks straight up out of the concrete signifying a road to cross along the bike path. A pole placed to signify caution, yet to me it was the glorious finish. I would tell my newbie to look at it, there it is, a quarter mile in the distance. But wait, she's not next to me, she's behind me. Wait. Did I leave her behind? Shit, my high school friend never left me. I need to focus. As I check my pace, I realize I hadn't sped up, she had slowed down. She slowed down with the finish line right in front of her. I found myself saying out loud,"you're pulling back. We are at the end and you are pulling back. Oh hell no. Not today."
She picked it up, and we would finish. Two days later we went on to run her first running 5k together. She pulled back once in the last mile, and again, I employed the "hell no" strategy, linking arms with her and pulling her back on pace where she would stay until we saw the finish. We came to the straight away and there it was. I could see the doubt in her eyes, until I told her to look at the clock. 35 minutes. She had done her last one walking, 75 pounds heavier months ago at 54 mins. I felt this would be the one thing keeping her from pulling back at the end. She would see she was so far ahead of where she was months ago, she would surely want to triumphantly sprint to the finish. I would point to a tree about 30 yards from the finish and tell her when we got there she was to give it all she had. Oh yes. We had this.
To my surprise, this very quiet racer to this point would say,"I F#@*ing can't!" I was shocked. She'd already kept pace for three miles. This was 30 yards, she was winning. Beating the prior versions of herself. No. This was not happening. This was the moment at the wholesome family oriented Heart Association 5k I found myself shouting at her. "You F#@*ing can! Now do it!" You know what? She did. Sprinted to the finish completing it in under 37 minutes, almost 18 minutes faster than her last one.
Since our two runs together, my newbie and me, I have thought a lot about this notion of pulling back just yards before the finish. As illogical as it seemed with a glorious finish in site, the urge to pull back was stronger than the urge to succeed. This is a notion I know all too well, dieting to within ten pounds of my goal, only to pull back and gain it all back. Start an exercise program with a goal in mind such as a race, but never registering and giving myself an out. Thing after thing. Time after time. I would come so close and pull back at the moment of truth.
In the three years since I have been on this journey, I have learned there is something scary about success. It changes who you are. Being complacent in the failure is somehow easier than living up to expectations that will surely come with doing things you have never done before. However, we miss so much avoiding the thing we say we want so badly. As for my high school friend, she and I reconnected some years back, both of us on a fitness journey, her as a marathon runner and me as a badass Spartan. She would come to climb walls and jump fire with me, and recently I would get to embrace the slap bracelet again with her during the handoffs of the 12 man 200 mile relay of Cape Cod Ragnar.
Through it all I have conquered my fear of heights, well mostly. I learned that I need to stop calling myself a non-runner, because running is less about the hard I originally thought it was, and more about control. It is that confidence and control that has leaked into other parts of my life, making the outsider's heightened expectations of me a bit easier to handle.
Mostly, though, I have learned the value of taking on these huge challenges with epic people. Beyond all of the finish lines I have crossed in the last couple years, I have found some of the best times of my adult life, and learned I am so much more capable than I ever imagined. These are things I would have missed had I continued to pull back like I did for all of those years. A week from Saturday, I will take on the Chicago Spartan Super for the second time with my son, my friends and a team of newbies. I hope those newbies realize, they will not pull back at the finish. Nope. Not on our watch. As they will soon see, there is a lot of value that lives in the space beyond jumping the fire and the finish line and the best is truly yet to come.
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