Accept Where You Are and Go From There By Glenn Munson “Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation. It means understanding that something is what it is, and there’s got to be a way through it.” – Michael J. Fox What do you do when you face a really discouraging life challenge? Not just a disappointing challenge, but a gut-wrenching, life-changing transformation that you didn’t see coming. Give up, resign, and let it eat away at you? Go through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance? Michael J. Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease at age 29, at the height of his career. We all know what he did then. He continued acting, started the Michael J. Fox Foundation and raised over $800 million for research into the disease. Now, I’m not comparing myself to Michael J. Fox, but I like to think that I did follow his example. In my case, I was handed a bad deal that cut short my running career, a rewarding career that gave me great satisfaction and enjoyment and also gave me the opportunity to travel and to make friends here in Memphis and around the country. But I made a decision that kept me going. I resigned myself to skip the first four stages of grief and go right on (almost) to acceptance. The First Tennessee Marathon was my first marathon in December 2000, two months after my fiftieth birthday. I had decided the previous spring that the marathon would be my mid-life crisis cure. I trained over the summer with Mark Higginbotham’s Green Team, lost 35 pounds, and became a marathoner. Mark preached fun for the first marathon, not speed, so we were slow, so slow in fact that the motorcycle policeman at the end of the running crowd warned us that there was a time limit! The best part of the whole race was, of course, the finish where serendipity had
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my daughter Courtney put the finishers medal around my neck. (That’s another story.) My time was 4:48:12, breaking my goal of five hours. Over the next couple of years, I became one of the best runners in my age group in Memphis. I began to consistently break 20 minutes for 5k races and 44 minutes for 10k. A year after St. Jude, I broke four hours in my third marathon; and in February, 2002, in New Orleans, I ran sub-3:30, my first Boston Qualifier. I qualified for Boston twelve years in a row, running it seven times, with my last qualifier in March, 2013, for Boston 2014. In early May, 2013, while running with my usual group of friends, I found myself unable to keep up with them. My breathing was way off, I had to walk, and I was sweating a whole lot more than usual (and that’s a lot!) Over the next couple of days, I picked up a cough, ran a serious fever, and tired easily. The diagnosis was pneumonia, and the first couple rounds of antibiotics had no effect. The drug that the doctor really wanted to give me had a side effect of a ruptured Achilles tendon (believe it or not), so he didn’t prescribe that one at first. Finally, after a month, he did and things cleared up soon afterwards. Unfortunately, it was a bit late. My pulmonologist confirmed with x-rays that I had lost about 25% of my lung capacity. That summer, my 5k time was almost 40 minutes, a 10k well over an
