Racing The Wind

“…There is no Finish Line

When you bring a beginner’s mind,

Take just one more step, each time….”

This is a quote from Darryl Purpose’s song “race the wind,” which embodies the Spirit of how I run these days: “…with Passion, curiosity and kindness…” and giving “my heart, from the start, with love and no regret.”

Coming from an elite athlete, this perspective may not seem that it fits. I can tell you, that I did not always have such a liberating perspective. My Running Journey has led me to places and people who have steered me towards self acceptance and kept my sense of wonder alive.

It is a journey I will tell the tales from here, in my Blog posts, at the same time bridging the present with this past.

This afternoon I met two new clients at the pool, a mother and daughter. I am charged with helping both of them gain more fitness. I brought aquajoggers for all of us (I have a pile of them from Camp), and led them through a workout in the deep end, which stimulated muscles throughout their whole body-and perhaps some they didn’t know existed 🙂 As they traveled back and forth, driving arms through the water, on one interval, they decided  “run” towards each other, as if to play a game of chicken. I smiled as I watched them joyfully approach each other, link arms and hands and smile, slowly letting go as they moved beyond an arms’ reach. They were really having fun.

Prior to meeting them, a man recognized me as the director of Landsharks, my kids’ running club in Boulder, and thanked me for doing it. He said that since the XC season has ended, his daughter now wants to run to school every morning, and he is trying to heal his basketball injuries from decades ago, so that he can keep up.

I left my work with beautiful, hopeful, excellent and exciting people, out into the early evening, to get my run in. I twas already 5:30, and I wondered if it would get dark. “Oh well,” I thought: “it’s a full moon; she will guide me back to my car if I need light.” I ran along the bobolink trail on south boulder creek, and over to the Buff Ranch. The moon put me in a trance, which was nice, because my legs are in dire need of a recovery day. I ran with deep satisfaction, that this running  journey is benefiting others in my community-especially the young ones, and that I am FIT right now. I have the U.S. Trail Marathon Championships coming up this Saturday, in Moab, Utah and I am ready to rest so that I can be a coiled spring and unwind for 26.2 miles.

Ingrid DiPaula, the wonderful and talented woman who designed my web-site and has been encouraging me and teaching me to boost my interface with social media and the community of runners in the world, through blogging, sent me an email tonight, saying: “Ready to see that new blog!”

I was eating a late dinner, after my moonlit run and eating up writing time trying to figure out which remote control turns on the T.V. 🙂

….so I could watch the Detroit Tigers and S.F. Giants in the World Series. My excuse for not writing earlier in the evening even has a thread back to my magical running past:

I sat before the T.V. in my Detroit Tigers t-shirt which I did a workout in and haven’t washed, since the start of the series. I have been a Tigers fan, ever since I received this t-shirt and a Tigers baseball cap from the owner of the team, in 1996. This arrived a week after I had been featured on the front page of USA Today’s Sports Page, approaching my final Collegiate race as a UO Duck, on our home track-Hayward Field in Eugene, for the NCAA Championships. In that article, I spoke of how frustrating it had been, to be called a “waif-like” runner in high school and that stature being regarded as “normal” for champion female runners.

The owner of the Tigers had a home in Boulder and had seen me running “up the canyon,” and said that he and his wife “always thought I looked more like a Warrior than a ‘waif,’ ” to them. He was wishing me luck, congratulating me on “persevering” and hoping that I would cheer for the Tigers…”..that someday they would be a team to be proud of.”

Even though I witnessed the disappointing looks on the faces of the Tigers tonight, I am still proud of them, and I am proud of myself. For I know that it’s the times we don’t do what we set out to do, that deepen the resolve to keep going for it, to keep trying, again and again. There really is No Finish Line; it’s like racing the wind-it never stops…and neither shall we.