Looking back and laughing at uncomfortable situations

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.

One other time a couple of my friends talked me into entering a 5K race. I was not in shape for a fast race and I told them that I would run the race for fun. I was about two miles into the race and well back in the pack of runners when I passed a runner that looked like he might be in my age category. At about 500 yards from the finish this runner that I had passed came up fast and was going to pass me. Being of competitive mindset, I thought that if I passed you then you cannot pass me back. We both sprinted that last 500 yards like a sprinter in a 100-yard dash. Why we were sprinting to the finish when we are somewhere near 100th place I still question. Since I was not in any kind of condition to do something like that I suffered from the dry heaves after I crossed the finish line. An occasion like this is just too much for a friend to pass up. He approached me and commented something like, “So, this is your idea of having fun in a race all bent over like that.” It is very difficult to make a reply when you are bent over and your stomach is telling you that any catchy comeback response is not possible now. Once again I can look back and laugh, and come up with perfect come back comments that were impossible to do at the time.

I wish I could have watched myself on one other occasion. Just trying to imagine the event makes me smile. I was running with Ros Hill across the Freeman Ranch road. At the time the road went through a longhorn cattle ranch. There was one longhorn that was huge. We named him “Goliath” because he was so big. One day Goliath was standing on the very edge of the road. As we ran by he raised his head and looked down on us with those big white eyeballs. Ros is about 6-foot-4 and said that it is not often that something looks down on him. Being that close to a huge longhorn, we knew that if he turned his head the horns would take us out like a blade of grass. After that I was a little tense and uptight. A short distance down the road, we came upon a young longhorn steer that was feeling a bit challenged. He lowered his head and began pawing the ground. I knew from experience that when a bull does this he is thinking about charging you. Since I was already nervous from running so close to Goliath, I panicked. I took off across the field thinking I might make the fence before he could catch me. But, as I stepped off the road I tripped on the lip of dirt on the side of the road and fell down. I tried to get up but my legs wouldn’t stop running, and I ended up in some sort of a crawl like effort. The bad part of this is that the ground I was crawling across was filled with cactus. While Ros stayed on the road watching me crawl through the cactus and laughing until he had stomach cramps, I was busy picking cactus thorns out of my knees. To this day I have a rough spot on my knee where those cactus thorns were embedded. Trying to imagine what I must have looked like, and knowing that Ros had one of the best laughs of his life, I just have to smile and know that I made somebody happy for the day.

I guess being able to look back at very uncomfortable, or painful, experiences and smile and laugh about them is better than being angry or bitter about them. I was just curious why it takes some time to recall the events and laugh. They were funny at the time, just not to the person that was the subject matter during the moment. But a short time later, even that person has to admit, it was funny.