Slow

I've come to a hard conculusion: I'm slow, and I'm never going to be fast again. And you know what? I can live with it.

As a younger person, in my teens and twenties, I was pretty fast. With little training I ran a 4:30-something mile, and my first 10-K, also without training, was low-40s. When I got back into running, thirty-five pounds overweight and in horrible cardio shape, I somehow thought that I'd get back to those numbers. Ha! I'll save the details of my early struggles for a later post, but suffice it to say that I'm a solid mid-20s 5-Ker and a high-40s 10-Ker, with little signs of getting much faster soon. At first it was hard to deal with that, but gradually it hit me. I could accept who I was and where I was or I could quit. Quitting would have been, let me assure you, much easier than not quittting. I'm very happy to be as slow as I am today, twenty-five pounds lighter, much fitter, much happier and with a full marathon under my belt. Without having accepted that I simply am what I am today and not what I want to be or used to be or dream of being, I wouldn't be a runner. Maybe I'll get faster. I'm kind of working towards that, but not in a way that puts pressure on me not to enjoy and appreciate the greatness of being a runner, a runner who's exactly as fast as he's meant to be, today.