The Heart is a Lonely Runner

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Watching Lance Armstrong win his seventh straight Tour de France took me back to my own glory days in the athletic competition arena. I was a burgeoning track star (always wanted to use that word, burgeoning) in eighth grade--- 1978. Well, maybe not quite.

I decided to enter a 3k race/walk for charity, the American Heart Association and convinced my best girlfriend to enter with me. She was a long lean thing too, but blessed with coordination, endurance and obsession. I am not naturally coordinated and my physical endurance stinks a lot of the time. I'm obsessed with things like scrabble and growing squash, not feats of athleticism.

We "trained" for a couple of months before the race. She loved training, compelling herself to the treadmill no matter the painful circumstances in her head or anywhere else. I haven't seen her in 20 years but I'm willing to bet she's still doing things like that.

Before my great idea to enter the "Run for Life", the only time I'd run for longer than it took to get out of the rain was well, never. Okay, it was once a year in phys.ed. class, where the threat of getting a failing grade loomed if you didn't complete the yearly "fitness challenge". We would line up in our matching powder blue one-piece polyester gym suits (an effort to make us feel like equals, I suppose, none more fashionably attired than the other) and pushed-up, sat-up, and chinned-up while our gym teacher, a mini-drill sergeant, recorded our results.

And we ran.

The only one who ran slower than me also weighed about three times as much. She was also a genius and I'm willing to bet she still is.

On race day, the whole bunch of adults and teenagers and even a few little kids seemed eager to get going. My fear of being trampled subsided in the first three minutes when the herd took off and I was left to wander the course in solitude. You know in cartoons when the woodpecker smacks into a wall? Picture that flailing of appendages but leave out the wall and you'll get an idea of the gracefulness of my gait.

My "team", my older brother and a friend, followed me through the streets paralleling the racecourse, in a bright yellow Volkswagen bug shouting, I think, words of encouragement. And playing country music. If I wasn't enough of a spectacle already.

In addition to not being blessed with coordination, I think my lungs are too small for my heart. And while I'm at it, my neck is too long for my head and my hair is too big for my head on occasion. But I digress.

Cue "Rocky" music.

I could have kept on running for another three feet or so. Really.

I crossed the finish line dead last. No mediocrity for me I thought, in my best lemons-to-lemonade delusion of grandeur, first or last.

I don't run anymore. Like Lance, I don't figure I have anything else to prove. I mean I know I can finish a race in last place.

And my friend? She finished near the head of the pack.

In that "Run for Life", I didn't have everything it took to win the race, and it really was more about raising money for the cause than winning, but I did have enough to finish the race. And some days that's enough to keep going forward, not turning back, putting one foot in front of the other.