Competing With Yourself By Michele Laughing-Reeves The alarm goes off at 5:30 am, a quick visit to the bathroom. You change into your running clothes, the ones you laid out the night before in anticipation of the morning’s temperature. You lace up your running shoes, reset your stopwatch, and then tiptoe out of the house. In the morning stillness, you stretch your muscles, take one last big yawn, and head East putting one foot in front of the other. At an elevation of more than a mile, the air is cool, but it will soon warm when the Sun rises. Despite the occasional traffic noise, coyote howls, and cows calling their little ones, you only hear your breathing and your shoes hit the Earth. One-mile flows into each successive mile, and before you realize it, it is time to head home. You feel strong, so perhaps you’ll run further tomorrow. This is how you choose to start your day. People run or jog for different reasons, and if you’re not on a cross-country team, your reasons are usually personal. People take up distance running to lose weight, to be healthier, or to be stronger. Then, there’s the rest of us who run for fun, to compete, or to reach a personal goal. Long distance running, like 10Ks and marathons, is a sport in which you are competing against yourself. Let’s be honest, when we sign up for a 10K
Des Linden beat me in this race; it was an honor. 36
July 2022
or a half-marathon, we register and pay the fee knowing full well that we won’t win any prize money. We show up to run a long, long way to prove to ourselves that we can do it, or that we can do it in a certain length of time. During the entire race, we are focused on our own pace, our own breathing, our own hydration, our own time, and not on other runners, especially the elite runners. Avid runners are considered crazy for being so discipline in their running routines, why else would a person wake up so early to run 6 miles in the cold, right? Some runners prefer early morning runs, like me, while others will run later in the day. The level of “craziness” depends on what type of runner you are. The crazy-talented runners are those that are born runners, who run to win races and become legends. These are the athletes who are born knowing who Steve Prefontaine was and could match his passion for running on any given day. The talented runners may have a natural gift, but they still train as hard as athletes of other sports. Winning a marathon, like Boston or New York, is very difficult, and very few Americans have won either in the past decades. American Des Linden won the women’s Boston Marathon on a rainy April morning in 2018, a goal she set more than a decade earlier. The Olympic marathon gold medals are rarer for Americans. Frank Shorter
My last half-marathon before the Pandemic.
