When it gets really, really quiet in my head—which isn’t often—I wonder what and who I would have been if I hadn’t become a runner. I wonder what my life would look like now, 20 years after I started running, if I had done what I had always done before: quit.
I was a 21-day enthusiast for most of my life. Whenever I wanted to do, or to be, anything, I could find the enthusiasm to do it for only about 21 days. What’s remarkable, looking back, is how wide-ranging my interests were and how wholly unabated by rational thought my ambitions were.
My basement and garage are littered with the equipment of my abandoned dreams. There is the tennis racket from when I was convinced that I could be the next Wimbledon champion. Or at least I thought I could learn how to play a decent game.
I couldn’t—not in 21 days anyway. My tennis playing consisted mostly of chasing balls around the court, swinging and missing, or connecting and sending them over the fence like home-run balls. So I quit.
I wanted to be good at waterskiing. Those 21 days were spread out over a couple of summers, but the result was the same. I came. I tried. I failed.
It turns out that one of the primary skills you need to be good at waterskiing is a sense of when to let go of the rope. I did not possess that skill. My approach was to cling with a death grip to the rope long after I had fallen face-first into the water. This approach, as you can imagine, resulted in my nearly drowning—not just once, mind you. Over and over again.
I did finally manage to get up on the skis. Well, I managed to get out of the water and into some kind of bent-knee stance that made me look like a marionette whose strings had broken. I would be pulled behind the boat until my arms got tired, and then, without letting go of the rope, I would fall into the water.
It never got much better than that. So I quit.
I thought maybe I could learn to kayak. I like the water, and the idea of paddling peacefully down a slow-moving river sounded nice. So I signed up for a paddling class.
It was all going fine until we got the kayaks into the water. I remember the instructor telling us to sit very still in the kayaks until we got a sense of what it felt like to stay balanced. At least, I think that was what he said, but I’m not sure because as he was saying it I was turning over, facedown, in the Chicago River, strapped into the kayak with the skirt attached.
Despite sheer panic, I was somehow able to release the skirt and get back to the surface. On the bright side, it gave the instructor the opportunity to teach rescue technique to the rest of the class.
Then there was the time I decided I wanted to learn to fish, thinking it would be a great father-son bonding experience. I bought the equipment, rented a boat, got a container of night crawlers, and—with my son in the boat—rowed out to the middle of the small lake, where we first lost the anchor and then dropped one of the oars into the water, watched it float away, and spent the next hour trying to figure out how to paddle over to it.
This is not a complete list of my failed attempts to be more active and more of an athlete. But I think you get the point. My desire to be athletic far exceeded my abilities.
What made running so magical for me was that almost from the first step I got it. I understood what it was to run, what it was to be a runner, and what it was to be alone with myself. I wasn’t any good at it; that was obvious. But I understood what I was trying to do.
Every run—even if it was only lots of walking with an occasional jog at first—opened some window into my mind or soul. Every step seemed to have the potential to unlock some mystery buried inside me.
When I ran from my childhood home, for example, down the streets and sidewalks that I played on during my elementary school years, I could hear the voices, see the faces, and feel the feelings from those days. I could feel the presence of my childhood friends.
I felt the shame from those days, the embarrassment at who I was, the disappointment of my repeated failures to be “as good” as everyone else. I ran through that neighborhood with a heavy heart.
When I got to the schoolyard, to the same piece of asphalt where I had played, to the same basketball hoops and baseball fields, it was as if I was releasing all of those feelings. I was there again, but this time I was there as a runner. Not a very good runner, but a runner nonetheless.
That sense of release from the bondage of my past, of clearing away the memories that served no purpose but to keep me chained to an image of myself that was no longer true, happened to me over and over again in the early years. It was as if I were undoing all the emotional knots—and “nots”—that were holding me back.
The hardest transition for many of us who are adult-onset athletes is to go from viewing ourselves as athletic failures to accepting that we are finally, truly, athletes.
It doesn’t seem to matter how successful we have been at other things or how much we’ve achieved in another arena; if we don’t heal the wounds of our past failures, athletic and otherwise, none of it matters. Or at least it didn’t to me.
I’ve seen a running t-shirt that says, “Cheaper Than Therapy.” There’s a lot of truth in that. I tried therapy but found that the answers I was searching for were easier to find on a run.
As I continued to run, as my running became more and more central to my life, I noticed a subtle but significant change in my attitude toward myself. The more I ran, the more running revealed to me who I was; the more I became aware of the truth about myself, the less inclined I was to let anyone else define me.
Now that running is integral to my life, now that I am running not because I have to but simply because I can, the insights into my essential self are perhaps less dramatic but no less profound.
I know I am stronger than I ever imagined I could be. Not stronger so much in a physical sense as in the sense that I feel capable of facing any of life’s challenges. Bring them on! As a runner I have had to reach deeply into myself, and when I have, I’ve discovered a mighty reserve of strength.
I face the challenges—of growing older, of changing relationships, of the good and bad of being alive—in the same way that I face the challenges of running. I now know that, in running and in life, there will be good patches and bad and that neither lasts forever. And I’ve learned that having a good plan is fine as long as I accept that nothing ever goes according to plan.
In the final analysis, running has taught me how to live. I have learned, with my own two feet, the meaning of triumph and failure, and the fleeting nature of both.
I have learned, through running, that the truth of any given moment is the only truth I can know for sure.
And the truth I know at this moment is that I am a runner.
Waddle on, friends.