Current mood:

contemplative

Why do I run?
I have a t-shirt that has this question on the front in small, understated letters that you have to get close to read. I bought it at a track meet in high school when the answer on the back was more or less true "because i'm fast."

I've been asked why I run many times, by many people. It never bothered me that I couldn't explain it. Other runners knew why, and they couldn't explain it either. Once you get it, running is just a part of you. But, somewhere in the mental process of kicking myself out the door yesterday to go on a cold, wet ride, that vague notion of why I would even want to go out on such a day didn't seem to be cutting it anymore.

I want a real answer.

The problem is, I think the real answer is so complicated that you can only find a piece of it at a time, and maybe you'll only ever get a vague idea of what the true reason really is. But I was reading Iron Wil's blog today and along with a post about a killer ride, there was a 5 minute video on Ironman. Go watch it for yourself. But in the video they show an athlete about 10 miles from the finish line on the ground with another athlete standing over him trying to get water from people and pouring it into the guy's mouth. You could tell it was getting late in the day, but the sun was still up and the picture was bright. The video moves on to other things, but comes back to this man, and they show him getting up with some help then telling the doctors that he wanted to keep going. Plain enough, right? Not quite. The thing is, by the time he was moving again it was pitch black out. I mean this guy had to have been on the ground for at least an hour, and he kept going. Amazing. I can't even explain how I felt about watching that.

I thought about that when I was running today. Not how the guy kept going, although that is inspirational enough by itself, but how I felt while watching it.
I thought of listening to another podcast where a guy told about how in his qualifying race for an Ironman he was steered wrong by an official, and after riding 10 miles out of his way, turned around and rode back so that he didn't miss any of the course. The race director was so amazed that he turned back and finished the course that he got his qualifying spot. Anybody watching my face while I listened must have been mystified to see the range of emotions I went through.
I thought of taking my two best friends to see Bend it Like Beckham when it came out, and not getting how they didn't appreciate as much as I did. Until it dawned on me that neither of them were the least bit athletic. They were looking at it through different eyes.

If this is what inspires me, how can I do anything other than trying to find that inspiration in myself. In the days where you can just run forever, in the perfectly executed race, in the time when you fall hard but keep limping along because DNF is not an option unless other people are carrying you off the course.

I just found another piece of my puzzle.