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Running When They Say You Can’t
Watch me prove you wrong
It started because I was fat, my great love of running. Not to lose weight or anything so mundane, but to prove to all the people who said I didn’t belong in sports that I could have accomplishments in this arena. Not belong in sports? Sure, I always got picked last for kickball and dodgeball, but I did play eighth-grade and high school volleyball and tennis. The eye-rolls still happened and people were not lining up to pick me. I loved sports but ended up quitting that passion no matter how hard I worked. No matter how many early mornings there were spent as a kid going running in the dark and eating bananas.
I was always last.
Then came college. In one of my major classes, we were given the question of what it would take for us to run to the local movie theater about two miles away. Others asked for money — I asked for shoes. There were groans in the room when I said that. People were trying to talk me out of it, saying that it was much further than I thought. All this guff for a heartfelt answer to a hypothetical question.
I was pissed off.
I stayed that way for years, salty beyond belief at people judging my body.
Then I chose to do something about it.
A good buddy of mine was a runner and we started talking in depth about it — the ins and outs of nutrition and daily grinding. I felt excited about the idea and immediately went out too hard. I had never run before and hadn’t been on a bike in twenty years, so naturally, I spent the next four days doing twenty-five miles a day of a running and biking combination. On day five, I returned to work sweating because my knees were in so much pain. But I had fallen in love.
And then I found an inaugural half-marathon to enter.
The day of the race was a freakishly cold and windy summer day, with a high of seventy when we’d all been training in the nineties and above. We were all freezing and went out too fast in order to try and warm up. It was glorious, this view of a sea of heads bobbing in the surging crowd, and I cruised on, surprised by not being automatically in last place.
I was spurred on by all the memories of people saying I couldn’t or didn’t…
