The Grit of Running

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." - Henry David Thoreau

Running long distance requires heart, passion and sheer discipline.  Like everything else in life, in order to cross daunting seemingly far away finish lines, every endurance runner practices again and again. We experience disappointments, fatigue, exhaustion, pain, but every day we go out there again to try again. Training for a marathon can take up to six months, and often we do not see results of our efforts until very close to the race.  Like everything else in life, we have to work hard, train harder and work through failures, but in the end we discover that we are better for it.  Too much in life is built on illusion.  We do not always get our dreams, and life is too short to discover all the things we want to be. 

Running is real. There is really not much use to color ourselves in pretense, to market ourselves as something we are not.  Either we make honest assessments of our capabilities, or we have to learn honesty in a painfully hard way.  Through trial and error, we discover who we are and what our bodies are made of. We test our limits and stretch our comfort zones.  

Like everything else in life, crossing finish lines and entering new start lines requires heart, passion, discipline.