Challenge to prove or to inspire?

Realizing I am about to cross the finish line of the 2015 North Face Endurance Challenge 50-miler in Sterling, Va.

“50 miles.  That is nuts.  Why?  Humans aren’t built to run long like that.”  Well, we are, but that is another story for another time.

Why not run?  Running 50 miles sounds like a challenge and I love to run.  Running outside for 50 miles sounds awesome.

For my 5’10” frame, running was less than graceful when I decided to enjoy it again as young adult.   As a child, being barefoot and running around my parent’s 7-acre semi-farm was a daily adventure during the warm months in Pennsylvania.  But somewhere between school work and dancing and growing up I stopped running.

Long story short, in my 30’s, I am finally running again and feeling just like I did when I was a kiddo.  My runs now, no pun intended, well maybe… are filled with buddies sharing potty-humor-runners-trots stories, humility, joy, failure, success, enlightenment, and the list goes on.  So far, my body has stayed healthy and injury-free minus a couple of falls here and there and I have birthed two babies.  (Can you believe that it was once believed a woman’s uterus would fall out if they ran?)  

“So why take on 50 miles?  What is wrong with running around the block to stay healthy?  What do you have to prove?”

Those are interesting questions.  And when I contemplate it I realize that I don’t take on challenges to prove any darn thing.  But instead I am curious.  I want to feel life.  I want to live life.  I want the good and the bad.  And 50 miles happened to have it all.  Actually, looking back, it had all good.  I met incredibly friendly runners along the race, my family and old friends cheered us all on, I got fitter and stronger, and I discovered a sense of mental and physical fortitude one can have when surrounded by so much positivity.

My husband recently gave a speech at a residency graduation dinner and included a quoted by Wendell Berry of which I will share…

The Peace of Wild Things
“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.  I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.  And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.  For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”  ~Wendell Berry

Instead of lying down, I run, surrounded then by peace and wild things and that is where I find stillness and freedom.
Be Well,
~MLC