Drastic Changes

I would like to start off this post with an apology.  Erin, I am sorry.  I told you I wasn't going to run, that I would take it easy on my foot and be prudent, but I felt crazy energetic this morning and did it anyway.  I'm sorry, baby, but I had to.  That last clause, however, is a good segue into the main theme of this post.  You see when I first started this quest of mine, a little over a month ago, I did so because I hated to run.  I had no love for running, especially long distances.  But I knew from experience, that the only way to make a drastic change in your life...is to make a drastic change.  Now this might sound like a tautology to most of you, and semantically speaking, it is.  However, instead of being totally non-informative, like most tautologies, this one holds the key to changing your life.  When I started this journey, I knew that in order to make it happen, I'd have to run on a schedule.  This schedule would stay the same whether I wanted to run or not.  If there wasn't a tornado, volcano, J-Lo, or anything else that ends in "o" outside, I would have to be there, running.  To do that would be the drastic change that I would make.  Now, having committed and made that change, I found myself today wanting--nay, needing--to run, despite the lingering pain and stiffness in my left foot (and lack of good running shoes to cradle it).  That is the drastic change that happened to me, which was the result of the change that I made.  So now the tautology should make some sense to you; if you want things to change drastically, you need to make drastic changes.  It was the workings of that law of the will that placed me in my living room, staring at my shoes as I put them on, thinking that a quick 3 mile run couldn't hurt.

But here's the kicker: though the pain kicked in pretty badly around the halfway mark, I used a little extra effort to keep the pressure off the left foot and trudged on.  I got in, iced it for a while, and it feels the same as when I woke up, which is far better than yesterday.  I wouldn't dare propose that the moral of this story is "keep running, even when your foot is begging you not to," but I will make the proposal that I didn't necessarily do the wrong thing this morning.  Yes, I could have sat around and nursed my foot, lord knows I have the free time.  I could've popped open a book, propped my foot up on the couch and let the day pass by.  But when it comes down to it, I have made running a part of my life.  I have never felt better than I do since I started.  I have more confidence, a sense of continuing accomplishment, and am more in tune with my body and my mind.  Simply put, running was that daily communion that I had been searching for, but never found.  In that way, it's kind of like your car keys; you're just miffed that you can't find them, and when you do, they're always in the last place you looked, and usually in a place you didn't think they could be.  Our world makes life tough enough as it is, take your peace where you can get it.  But just because you've found your peace, your spirit, doesn't mean you have answers, it just means that you're okay with letting the questions stay open-ended.