We have often heard the phrase that life is a marathon, not a sprint. That might sound like a very cliche and overused idiom, but as a marathoner, I like to think I have a unique spin to it — especially as a runner going into the Boston Marathon in three months.
I am a runner by happenstance, luck, and condition rather than willingness. I first started running in middle school because my best friend peer pressured me into joining the cross country team, and stayed with running because all of my friends ended up also being runners.
I remember my very beginning days as a middle school cross country runner when I pushed myself to the brink of exhaustion on every warm-up and every run. Initially, I had trouble running a 10-minute mile. I was one of the slowest runners on my team and it made me ashamed, but hungry to do better.
Every run, every workout, and every race, I pushed myself to the brink of exhaustion. My teammates would commonly tell me to "chill out" on runs because my breathing was so heavy it distracted even them. I would like to say that the fact that I pushed myself so hard, all the time, was an indication that I was tough.
No — I was ignorant. I simply didn't know any better. I wandered cluelessly into runs and gave them everything I had, as soon as I had, and put in a sprinting effort the entire session of a run.
That would mean that every time, I would go out way too fast and try to maintain a pace I knew I couldn't keep. I would make sudden surges whenever someone passed me, and I would instantly build up lactic acid in my legs.
I would improve to a sub-7 minute mile my first year running cross country, and that happened naturally as a result of the fact that I simply started running.
I have been a runner since then, almost nine years now. Running has taught me a lot of things and a lot of valuable lessons. It has taught me that I'm more capable than I've ever imagined, as my times and my races may have proved. It has taught me that I thrive on connection and social interactions with others — if I didn't have teammates, friends, and coaches to be alongside me and push me all those years, I never would have gotten to where I am now as a runner.
Running has made me who I am. I will always be a runner — always. It has taught me that I have more willpower than I ever imagined, as well as more ways of connecting with people than I ever thought I would have. It has taught me that it's better to run smart and be patient than to run hard. I have made lifelong friends and companions who are runners, teams from high school and college that have made me who I am and given me a sense of community. My teams have been my family and God's gifts of unconditional love to me — to this day, my running friends are the ones I still keep in touch with, whose weddings I'll go to and who I will fly thousands of miles to see.
These are the friends that stood tall with me when things got tough. They are the ones that listened to me when I inevitably had to open up about experiences with my family. Yes, running taught me a lot of valuable things outside of community, like how slowing down is sometimes the best thing I can do, and how you don't always need to be going a million miles per minute to get things done.
Running showed me that there's something indescribable in shared suffering in a given experience that bonds you more than any other thing.
I experience this now as a teacher, and can probably use the advice well to slow down and not surge as I do as a runner, but running was the first thing to teach me that.
When you first start a run, it can seem impossible. Say you have to run four miles. Say you have to run eight, 12, 16, 20, or the God-forsaken 26.2 mile marathon. At first, you don't know if you can do it. You don't know if you can make it through, and you occasionally make the mistake of going out way too fast for a pace you know that you can't sustain for the given amount of time you're running. That's fine — I've done it many times. Even today, I tried to keep up with a bunch of guys I wasn't as fit as, and ended up suffering a lot because of it.
But then you do get through it. You don't know-how, and perhaps the experience was a lot better and more palatable because you had a lot of people to do it with you. You go on one mile at a time, one meter at a time, one step at a time, until you're able to make it through your run. And even when you do make those mistakes, even when every step feels like Sisyphean labor, you don't give up.
Life is a marathon, not a sprint.
And life, like running, requires that you pace yourself and not go out too fast all the time. Life requires that you have a community and family to get you through your most trying and difficult moments, and life requires that you don't give up and that you have people there with you, similarly suffering, similarly trying, and similarly not giving up.
Running gave me a lot of things. It taught me willpower and resilience, but above all, it gave me lifelong friends, community, and a second family to supplement my own through strife and struggle.