REMEMBER WHY YOU ARE DOING IT

As I prepare to head out on my intermediate 10-mile run in the sleet/snow on this early Thanksgiving Day morning, I can't help but share this thought with you: "Remember why you are doing it..." It has been a thought I've carried with me through my career, my family life, my passions, my dreams and my adventures. As runners, we often can find ourselves saying comments like, "I would love to do better or get my miles in, but my family or work is getting the way..." This is a great time to literally stop and ask yourself, "What is my family or work getting in the way of?" Remember why you are doing it...

Why do we put ourselves through all these monotonous miles and painful private moments on the road for a little bling? Some might surmise it's our subconscious need to run away from our personal dilemmas, obstacles and challenges of Life. Others might theorize that it's our conscious act of substituting the physical race with those emotional/social “races” we cannot seem to overcome in Life. It was along a quite training run, in those early morning hours before sunrise, where I came to the realization that so many of my running colleagues and I were and are running BECAUSE of those personal challenges and emotional races of our life.

We come together to run because of loved ones. And personal challenges. And difficult hardships. And glorious dreams. But we run to face them head-on; to apply the seed of our accomplishment that germinated in these training runs and races to so many other areas of our life. We run in spite our personal challenges and despite our difficult hardships. We run to ignite our glorious dreams and loved ones. We run to again redeem that youthful spirit that remains nestled in each of us. This is our adventure, our gauntlet, our cause and our legacy. For all these reasons because and so many more, perhaps, each of our training runs, we are simply seeking a small morsel of personal "REDEMPTION ON THE RUN."

That's my simple thought and wish for you: Remember why you are doing it. Any bling, regardless of its greatest sheen or size, will always pale in luster and feel hollow if one doesn't begin his/her first step of the race with a satisfying completion to the statement: Remember why you are doing it.