Ruckus in the Garden

Your running career is not going to be perfect. You will have setbacks, you will plateau, you will sob because you feel like you ruined your one chance at that goal time or that championship or that win, and you will be devastated over injuries that require months of rest. At least once, you will confess to your coach or your teammate or your best friend that you feel lost and like all of your hard work never mattered. At least once, you will think about quitting.

We acknowledge the great things about running all the time, but I don’t think we talk about the tears and the broken bones and the times we fall short nearly enough. Real running is not like the movies; the fact that you have been training for that race for years, or the fact that this is your last race of high school, is not going to change the fact that it is entirely possible to work your butt off and lose. Sometimes we don’t meet our goals. You might bomb your last high school race; you might get injured 2 weeks before state; you might be 41st at nationals and miss earning an All-American spot by less than a second. Running is not a fairytale and it does not always have the ending we dreamed of, and I think we need to acknowledge that more often.

But you know what I realized? Ten years from now, when we’re finishing our first marathons or running in the Olympic Trials or graduating college or walking down the aisle, high school and college running aren’t going to matter in the least. If you think about it, we’ve barely started; if you consider how much running we have left to do, we’ve barely taken our first steps. Ten years from now, the only thing we’ll really remember about these years of running is how they made us feel. The times, the titles, the months of cross-training…they won’t be nearly as important as the funny memories and the inside jokes and the long runs in the rain with friends.

If you’ve ever doubted yourself as a runner, this is worth it: