Guide My Feet While I Run This Race

Recently I heard a choir sing an old spiritual I hadn’t heard before:  “Guide my feet, while I run this race, ‘cause I don’t want to run this race in vain.”  It sums up how I feel about this whole process.  I’m at a bit of a crossroads with my goal to run 13.1 miles on February 23, 2014.  The Disney Princess Half Marathon requires you to maintain a 16 minute per mile pace and I’m not there yet.  I’ve actually been disappointed by how little time I’ve dropped from my mile runs over my four months of running.  I can run for longer periods of time, I’m just not covering as much ground as I hoped to.  But I press on, because there’s a voice somewhere deep that keeps telling me I can do it.   (And I can take solace in the fact that I haven’t quit, which is a pretty big deal for me.  Also, last week I swallowed a bug while on a run, and I figure that makes me just about as much of a “real” runner as finishing a race would.)

So many people have said such kind things to me about my writing, and it has meant so much.  As big a goal as running 13.1 miles is, the other goal for this journey was to live more authentically and to allow myself to be vulnerable.  This authentic-vulnerable place is not an easy one for me. There's a part of me that wants to go through life with my head down, not ever calling attention to myself.  But that part cannot coexist peacefully with the other part that puts so much stock in other's opinions of me.  It is a weird balance that I haven’t mastered yet.  But really, have any of us mastered this yet?  (If so, please share with the world.)

And it doesn’t get any easier when I dig deeper.  Am I “head-down-non-attention-seeking” because of the introverted part of my personality?  Or am I avoiding opportunities to experience new things?  And is my approval seeking cowardly because I’m unable to decide if something is worthwhile on my own?  Or could it be an unsophisticated attempt to be vulnerable?  (And just what would a “sophisticated” attempt to be vulnerable look like?)  Why do I ask so many questions?

Maybe that’s why I keep running, even though I’m not much faster than when I started in January.  Because every other day for an hour or so, the pounding of my feet drowns out the voices in my head that question just about everything I do.  And the running makes me so tired that the questions don’t stand a chance at night as I’m drifting off to sleep.  Running is helping me think less and live more. 

I’m trying to pass this along to my kids as well.  They are very careful about trying new things, which can be good (drugs, “Jackass” style stunts) and not so good (swimming, vegetables).  And while I want them to be cautious, I don’t want them to miss out on something fun because they are too scared to fail, or worse, look foolish trying something new.   In fact I often forget just how alive I’ve felt when I’ve let go of the head-down-no-attention as well as the what-will-others-think parts of my personality and jumped into uncomfortable situations with both feet.  That feeling of “Oh my gosh, I’m really doing this!” is wonderful.

The one disappointment I had on our original Disney trip (where I learned about the Princess Half Marathon) is that the boys were too afraid to try any ride that was the slightest bit scary, even Splash Mountain.  Pirates of the Caribbean was about as intense as we got, and even then there was a little more “fingernails digging into mom’s arm” than I would have liked.  If I’m running 13.1 miles on our next trip, the least they can do is take a chance on Space Mountain.

This reminds me a quote from one of my favorite movies, “Parenthood.”  Gil’s grandmother recalls a roller coaster ride: 

You know, when I was nineteen, Grandpa took me on a roller coaster.  Up, down, up, down. Oh, what a ride!

I always wanted to go again. You know, it was just so interesting to me that a ride could make me so frightened, so scared, so sick, so excited, and so thrilled all together! Some didn't like it. They went on the merry-go-round. That just goes around. Nothing. I like the roller coaster. You get more out of it.

Here’s to frightened, scared, sick, excited, thrilled, all of it.  ‘Cause I don’t want to run this race in vain.

If you haven't heard it, click for an awesome version of this song:  Guide My Feet