Saturday, October 18, 2008

Back among the living......


I just got home from running my first 5K in 10 years!! WHEW! I am tired, but I feel SO good!

When we were in high school, my husband and I were huge basketball players. We love it. We love the competition, the smell of your new basketball shoes when you put them on for the first practice, the soreness that overtakes you that first week of the season, the first game jitters, the roar of the crowd when you sink the game winner, we love basketball! Its my thing, its what I do, Im not good at any other sports:

I. play. basketball.

Now for some ungodly reason my freshman year of high school, I let my brother who is 2 years older talk me into joining the cross country team. He said "it'll be good for you, you need to make friends and it will get you in shape for basketball season." Reluctantly I went to the first practice not realizing that there are no try-outs for this ridiculous sport. You show up, you're on the team. YIKES! My parents were big into the no-quitting rule, so there I was, a basketball player trying to pretend like I was a granola-eating, nature loving runner. That was the longest 3 months of my life. To make the humiliation just that much better, my brother is an all-state runner, he got scholarship offers from every school under the sun, he wins races with hundreds of people in them, hes amazing, I hate him. That fall taught me so much about humility. I was good at basketball, I always had been leading scorer, point guard, team captain, those were my titles on the court. All that pride came crashing down on the trail, I was a cross country pine rider, I might as well have been the stats girl, no titles for me here. My brother would win the race, do a cool down, and then come back and run the last mile with me. But you know what I remember most, all those people lining the shoot at the fnish line, they cheered as hard and loud for me as they did for Scott when he had come through 15 minutes earlier. It makes me think about in the bible where it talks about a cloud of witnesses. I want to be the kind of friend, who no matter what has happened in someones life, they know I'll be standing there yelling at the top of my lungs, "YOU CAN DO IT!!" and if that means jogging back and running through tough times with someone, I'll do it. I think this would be the perfect place for the ol' WWJD!
Scotty Dean, I love you, thanks for inspiring me to keep on, you're an amazing runner, but a better friend.
So.....half-marathon next anyone???? HA!

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