Fast and Furious. It was HOW WE RAN yesterday. Coincidentally, it was also the name of the event. There are innumerable explanations for both of us setting personal bests in the 5K, including the simple adage “some days you’ve just got it”. Bev often says that if you do enough runs, a small percentage will feel effortless as you chew up the road, an equally small percentage will feel like your legs have turned to cement-filled stumps, and all of the others, the vast majority, will fall somewhere in-between.
Today, my run felt nearly effortless. Bev didn’t have the same kind of day, never quite hitting her usual rhythmic tempo, but she still flew through the course and we were within seconds of each other at the finish line. When runners have a race where everything comes together, they immediately begin to deconstruct their effort with the hopes of replicating it. They start with all of the physical factors. Weather, rest, shoes, flexibility, training, and apparel. General health, allergies, hydration, fuel, and digestion. The list of things that can go wonderfully right or horribly wrong can be very long. I ran in new shoes, had no apparel malfunctions, and all of my body parts cooperated. That’s a good race day.
Yet, I’ve had plenty of races where all of those things have gone right and never finished close to today’s race time. I expect someone to knock on the door at any moment and tell me to pee in a cup. I wonder if my Claritin is on the list of banned substances. I also doubt that it helped me find my inner gazelle.
Do you remember the scene in Forrest Gump when young Forrest is running down a country road and he runs like the wind as the pieces of his leg braces fall off? Once he shed those braces that straightened his spine and he was no longer constrained and defined by them, he ran free. And fast. My braces haven’t been orthopedic but they’ve been just as restrictive. Divorce, work, the voice that whispers “oh, that’s not you (insert positive attribute – fast, competitive, deserving… you get the idea)”, and the real killer, defining self through the eyes of others. All of those things that keep us from reaching our fullest potential manifest themselves in the oddest ways and it takes hard work to loosen their grip. They slow you down, or worst, keep you stuck in the mud while a full, rich life passes you by. But if you keep at it, you might just wake up one day and run free. And fast. And if you’re REALLY lucky like me, you have your own Jenny right alongside you yelling “run, Forrest, run!”.