I'm a movie quote girl.
Remember in the movie Airplane when Lloyd Bridges says he picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue?  Well I thought of that quote yesterday when I gasped my way through the end of my workout on a gooey, humid morning.  I picked the wrong time to make a comeback.
I was red-faced, sucking wind, seeing stars, hanging on by a thread, looking incredulously at my Garmin and wondering how in God's good name I could be dying when my pace near the end of a 5 mile progressive pace run was 5 seconds/mile SLOWER than my marathon pace.
If I hadn't been on the verge of nausea, I would have eaten a thick slice of humble pie.
It's the love/hate part of running.  It's the mystery and the misery.  The triumph and the triage.  It's why we give up and lace up, over and over again.
I began to doubt that I had ever in my life run 26.2 miles.  Or 50 miles.  That had to have been someone else - an impostor, a stunt double, someone in the witness protection program.   I could not conjure any memory of it, or fathom any possibility of it.
When we are humbled or vulnerable, old voices like to sneak back in.  I heard some adolescent ghosts whisper to me that I sucked in sports, that I was simply no good, that I should stick to books and assignments, that other people were athletes and I was simply a nerd (and my only B would be in PE).  Ugh.
I read something about how elephants are trained.  When they are young they are tied up by one ankle with a heavy chain.  No matter how hard they struggle or pull against it, they cannot escape.  Over time they accept this condition as their destiny and full grown elephants are able to be restrained by a wimpy little ankle chain.  Anyone with eyes could see that with one tug of their mighty leg the elephant could instantly break their tether, but the elephant has no idea.  The strongest animal on land dreams of freedom.
How often are we like the elephant?  We are restrained by the old voices that used to define us when we were young.  The heavy chains are nothing more than twine, easily snapped, if only we knew we had the strength.

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