"I'm a distance runner. I've been trained to keep going even when it's hard. When it hurts. When it sucks. When I don't want to. I look past it. Relentless forward progress to the finish. Call it what you want; stubbornness, endurance, determination, guts. Deep down, I don't know how to give up. [And it's always worth in the end]."
Author Unknown.
Quote courtesy of Ving-Nation and Speak Words of Hope
When times get really hard, when friends feel a million miles away (both figuratively and literally), when people keep getting sick and there is an infuriatingly small amount you can do about it, when there really are not enough hours in a day, when sleeping feels like a luxury, when ten pm becomes the new 6 pm, when dinner is nothing more than vegetables and hummus because the thought of doing anything else is exhausting, when your brain is so tired from all the thinking and all the working and all the studying and all the writing and all the tutoring...
that's when it's time for a run.
I have never once recalled an awful moment on the pavement. I've fallen. Oh, I've fallen more times than I can count. I've cramped and tripped and blistered and peeled and ripped and torn and split and broke and peed in the woods. But never once have I looked back and said, "I'm never doing that again." Because I've hit the ten kilometer mark and the twelve kilometer mark and the thirty kilometer mark and I've celebrated with fat men and breastfeeding women that we are all the same in our tights and sneakers. I've logged weeks with 50 kilometers and herniated a disc and broke through the back of a shoe.
And it's all a metaphor for what we can accomplish. It's all a run: we're all hitting the pavement. And why I never look back and say, "I'm never doing that again" is why I need to keep hitting the pavement some more. Because eventually I'm going to look back on my life and think the same way about it as I do about running: what a trip...am I ever glad I did that.
Keep running, babies.
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