Life Lessons In a Foot-Race

The Seattle Marathon,

First things first. I ran the half marathon, finished, and lived to blog about it.

As you may recall, Meg came to me a few weeks ago and asked if I wanted to run the Seattle half marathon with her. I'm not a runner, but I just figured it was a good to challenge my over forty carcass to do something outrageously hard every once-in-awhile, so I said yes. I tried to train some, but for reasons I won't go into I was not as prepared as I should have been when I walked through the downtown predawn toward the starting line this morning.

There was a record turnout this year and I began the run through the skyscrapers of Seattle in a pulsing mass of people dressed in micro-fiber and expensive shoes. Surprisingly running across downtown wasn't that hard and the first three or so miles felt pretty good. There

really is something about the energy of a crowd all heading for one goal that enables you to perform at your best.

I won't give you the blow-by-blow but suffice it to say that easy-peasy feeling soon gave way to fatigue, numbness, and eventually downright pain before I crossed the finish line. But along the way I learned some lessons and that's what this post is about.

All along the route I was thinking about all the proverbs and metaphors I've heard through my life about how life is a journey and the hardest, longest journeys all begin and end with one step - all you have to do is keep stepping between the beginning and end.

You know it really did get hard out there. I've never run a half marathon before and sometimes when I passed a mile marker I was a little discouraged to see that I hadn't made more progress. Failure was always an option for some. There were vans and medical tents to take care of those who felt they just couldn't go on and I could have just decided it was too hard, cited several reasonable excuses and stopped stepping - but I didn't. Instead I finished and in finishing I learned something that applies to life.

I wasn't first by a long shot. In fact I was pretty slow by comparison to several hundred other runners including Meg who, at 2:20:00, finished about an hour ahead of me.

That didn't matter. As long as I was willing to keep taking steps I was in the race and had a good chance of reaching my goal. In some ways I was my own umpire. Nobody was going to call me out if I didn't do it to myself. It was hard. It took a long time. But I kept stepping and I have my goal. My medal says so - "Seattle Marathon 2007 Finisher"

I think as soon as I heal from the waist down it's time to begin training for next year. This finishing thing's addictive.

Cheers,

Dave