Patience

Way back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was your typical, high energy, impatient little boy, always wanting instant gratification rather than taking the long view. Kids, especially at a very early age, are prone to such thinking. After all, at that age we don’t have the benefit of life experience, and our little brains can hardly see beyond the next minute or hour. By golly, if I want that cookie or the latest cool Atari video game, I want it now. What’s with this waiting or patience stuff? To this day I can still remember my mom preaching the old saying, patience is a virtue, and I suppose over the years, I have grown and matured (though that is subject to some debate) and am much more patient as an adult.

Since June 2007, I’ve had to exert more than my fair share of patience, first with the slow recovery of my ankle, then breaking my left elbow and going through yet more physical therapy, then enduring a nasty case of pneumonia this past spring. Through it all, I would tell myself that the end was just around the corner, and that better days were ahead --- PATIENCE, PATIENCE, PATIENCE, I kept telling myself.

Now that I’m better, with no major ailments or afflictions in sight, my reserve of patience seems to be dwindling, at least in regards to running, not a good thing when training for a marathon. Prior to injuring my ankle, I was what you would call an avid runner, some might say too avid. I would run 6 days a week, sometimes twice a day. I would run in the rain, in the snow, in hot and humid weather, in below freezing temperatures, nothing would deter me from pounding the pavement. In a typical year, I would run 15-20 races over varying distances from 5ks and 10ks, to 10 milers, half marathons, and of course the big daddy, a full 26.2. The injury was but a mere interruption.

Training for a marathon, like the race itself, requires a great deal of patience --- slowly building up your weekly mileage, slowly adding miles to your long runs and daily runs, and gradually increasing your pace and speed. Too much, too soon, too fast, and you’ll wind up injured. Yet as I write this post and realize that I need to take my time, there is a part of me that wants to go home this afternoon and run 20 miles. There’s a part of me that wants to prove that this ankle injury is behind me, a distant memory, and the only way to do it is to push myself to the edge, to the brink, even chancing injury. In the end I know that I shouldn’t and that I probably won’t go out for that run, yet there is still a small part of me, that five year old in me, that wants that cookie right now!