I am not sure why this contrast of feelings occurred to me this week. The contrast is when you experience something physically painful, or have extreme discomfort, and then years later you laugh at the incident. At the time it was painful or uncomfortable and was not funny – except maybe to your friends that watched the event take place. Now, years later you also find the event funny and laugh at yourself for what you experienced. I started to think back at some of these events that I experienced when I was running races and training every day.
The one that stands out the most was running my first marathon. I wanted to break four hours in the race. After three and a half hours, I was approaching the finish. The volunteer yelled, “The finish is just around the corner and is flat to the finish.” I turned the corner and there was no finish line in sight, and there was a small overpass over a stream. To me, in my state of tiredness, that was a hill. A few cuss words about the volunteer giving me false information occurred to me. Then I saw the 26-mile marker ahead of me and I knew that the finish was just up ahead. I checked the time and it was 3:40. I had 20 minutes to run that quarter of a mile. Trying to do any sort of math problem when you are tired is not an easy thing to do. Since I wanted to break that four-hour mark and still had a quarter of a mile to go, my mind tells me I need to sprint. Even walking one lap around a track slowly can be done in five minutes. But, in my tired and confused state, I thought I had to sprint to make that time.
The one lesson I learned from that last quarter of a mile is that when you make some very tired and tight muscles sprint, it is not a good thing. I crossed the finish line and almost immediately the legs locked up. My friends had to lean me against a wall to put my warm ups on over my legs. I could step down off a curb, but I could not step up on the curb on the other side of the street. It was a very uncomfortable, and slightly painful, experience at the time and not much fun. Looking back at what I must have looked like, and how I hobbled around, finds me smiling and laughing at the experience.
