Murphy’s Bye-Laws

For too long a common strategy for dealing with turmoil in my life had been retreat, avoidance, and running away. Things that bothered me stayed lodged in my psyche and scabbed over with neglect to fester into an infectious sore never to be addressed or healed. Addressing some of these sores, I think, has resulting in me setting an unexpected and quite random goal of running a 5K race. But what am I running for (or from)?

At first I thought that maybe I was driven by nostalgia. Aside from good grades in school, which was pretty much doing the minimum (if you want me to wear 25 pieces of flair, make 25 pieces the minimum), running was the only thing that I ever really felt like I was better than average at. My ascendance to this feeling was fast but also quite fleeting. After only a half of a season in cross-country where I was improving exponentially, it seemed, I changed schools to a school without a team. Whatever progress was made in the one season of track and the half-season of cross-country was halted and I lingered in mediocrity while still clinging to the feeling of actually being good at something. It took a long time to let that feeling go, all the while blaming my parents for the move. At first, I thought this was a ploy to try and regain some of that nostalgic feeling; to reclaim the personal achievement I just missed out on and the feelings surrounding those running events.

It later crossed my mind that the whole Multiple Sclerosis (MS) angle of the race and the fact that my father had just suffered major setbacks due in large part to his MS may have had something to do with it. With a minimal amount of reflection this reason turned out to be false as well. While I had concerns for my father’s condition, I was also less than sympathetic (see Regretful Reactions). See, whatever laziness I exhibit surely stems from my dad’s genes. Always a rather sedentary person, his debilitation from MS seemed like a convenient excuse for sympathy and lack of activity. Even when he was advised over and over again to exercise (even a little) to maintain as much strength as possible, the ass groove in the recliner and the muscles in his television remote finger were the only things developing. This contrast between a man who could, at one time, do things and chose not to and a man who was no longer able to do things even if he wanted to colored my sympathies and feelings about his physical condition. These mixed feelings and the added disappointment from other non-health related things (not to mention the blame I laid on him for my shortfalls and disappointments in high school) really tarnished any semblance of a relationship.

So while attempting to gaze to the outside for reasons and blame for a whole host of things, I ended up only seeing my own reflection in the glass. No matter how hard I looked or how the light shone on the pane, it was still only my own reflection that I saw. Then I realized that I was running to avoid becoming the kind of person I disliked about my father. I know most folks live a big portion of their lives trying to avoid this fate to varying success. After looking at that reflection for a while, I can now say that all the reasons I’m training for this race have everything to do with myself and little, if anything, to do with anybody else.

I run now because it was a concrete goal with an end and I am not very good at following through or finishing. A little effort? A little discomfort? It was always easier to just do something else. In matters of my own fitness and health, I’ve shunned advice and mainstream medical protocol (which I can still say I don’t regret), but I also ignored advice that made sense to me because of laziness and an unwillingness to change.  I don’t know that I’ll continue to be a runner when the race ends – I don’t think dealing with pain via a constant stream of ibuprofen is a good sign of something I should continue indefinitely – but I do think that some regular fitness program is in my future. I also think that goals previously thought too hard or unattainable will look like low-hanging fruit after running this race. I am still running from something, though: fear. I am leaving fear of failure, fear of adversity, and fear of uncertainty in the dust. And the habit of looking outside for the cause of problems is still standing back at the starting line.