Sunday, February 12

Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme

The title for this blog post comes from one of my favorite movies ever. Cool Runnings.

With the Winter Olympics on tv and all, I've been thinking about that movie a lot lately. Especially the scene that is most important.

The big scandal is that the coach, John Candy's character had been a darn good bobsledder at one point. But he wanted to win so badly that he cheated. When one of the Jamaican bobsledders confronts him about it and asks why, the coach says he had his priorities out of whack.

Basically, he said, the gold medal won't make you whole. If you're not enough without it, you won't be enough with it.

Thinking about that makes me think about why I want to run the marathon. As cultural currency, a marathon finisher's medal has a lot less value than a medal from the Winter Olympics. And I've already got a finisher's medal from the St. Jude Half-Marathon. For most people, that is awe-inspiring.

Why do I want to run 26.2 miles with a number paper-clipped to my shirt? Running, for the most part, is fun. I enjoy it. On top of that, I enjoy challenges. With the weather so cold today, it was tougher than usual. But it was still good to get out there and see what I could see and run as far as I ran.

But also, I love challenges. I pretty much know I'm not going to scale Everest or Kilimanjaro. But I think I can do this and I'm excited about it. I want to push my body to the limit and know that I survived. And if I don't survive? I will survive. I will finish the race.

It might not mean anything to me, but it will mean a lot. No coach will pull me out and say I don't look like I know the play. No one will say I'm too skinny or too fat to run the race. In fact, no one else but me really has much to say about how it's all going to go.

And I say it's going to be a great race, a lot of fun. Cool running, you know?

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