Back to the Beginning

I don’t remember where I heard it - maybe I read it somewhere, but I know that once in a while people need to stop and look at where they’ve started in order to figure out exactly where they’re going. Well, no time like the present, I say: As I sit here recovering from the whirlwind of the past 12 months (at least for another week), I think back to that night one year ago that I decided to sign up for that first 10K – that was the night that started it all.

I really did have it all, healthy, happy kids, a supportive and caring husband, a great career, two Masters degrees, the big house in the suburbs, the fancy car, really everything. But I was just so unhappy and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why.

I felt that I still needed to climb to something - maybe I need to be Hollywood perfect, so I bought all of the fashion magazines, watched the home makeover shows, I just felt something else calling me – maybe I should be a superstar…maybe I should invent something or discover something. There's something more in me. And that’s when it all started to make a little more sense.

I found a Steve Prefontaine quote that summed it up for me, the feeling I had about who I wanted to be, what that growling thing was inside of me.

“Somebody may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it.”

THAT is the heat that I felt. But I was nowhere near qualified to say such a thing of running, considering that I hadn’t run even a block since they made me run the mile in high school gym class. And even then I don’t think that I ran it entirely. But it fit because that’s how much I believed in what I could be. That’s who I saw myself becoming because inside it was already gnashing and clawing at the sides of things looking for a way out.

And a year later, a half-Ironman and two marathons, a handful of triathlons, and a half-finished book later, I come back to the beginning of it to reassess. I still have it all, and I can be happy now because I believe more than ever that this quote sums up what drives me, what pushes me to keep going or to take a chance. It defines how I want to feel everyday about everything - writing, triathlon, whatever I do, I want to be the best because I know that I can be. That's the feeling that got loose in my gut that night, and started tracking up life to the point that I couldn’t take a step without seeing its footprints – still wet of my own ink.

Physical ability can be carved, mental toughness can be forged, but passion must be born – it takes flesh and blood and heart and guts. And that’s why you have to bleed to be the best.