Mountains and Mole Hills

It is so easy for me to get lost in the big picture.
I feel the pressure and the obligation of looming deadlines and future events. So much so, that I begin to feel like the weight of the world is pressing down on my shoulders and the days are crushed underneath all of my future obligations, so that they collapse into sharp pebbled-rocks under my feet. I do not remember days, enjoyable in their beginnings and their endings, simply, intermittent pangs and sharp reminders of what is to come.
Running keeps me grounded. Everyday I am challenged.
I can not get lost in the pressure of the big picture, when I know that my biggest challenge of the day will comes early in the morning on the treadmill.
Running turns those pebbles into mountains. I am no longer on a path of sharp rocks, a means to an end, where the finish is always in sight but never reached. Rather, I am climbing mountains. Every morning I am reaching goals, and setting new personal bests, and I am making my way through each day, not at the whim of the sharp reminders of the future, but by the joy of scaling small mountains.

When It hurts.

It's a funny thing, a theme that I've recognized in my running, that appears often in my life and was only able to articulate after I experienced it in my running:

There comes a point in every run when I realize that it is easier and less painful to keep running than it will be to stop.

If I am at this point, and I do stop, my heart rate is too high, and I feel a jolt of nausea, I become faint, and the degree of pain in my calves moves from dull to excruciating. That is a painful experience that I do not enjoy. I use the thought of this impending, truly painful experience, to motivate myself to continue running when I am feeling tired, or slightly pained. So, we have two very different types of pain: The pain of stopping, and the pain of continuing.

I once told someone that it hurts when I run. They were shocked. "It's not supposed to hurt is it? Why do you do it if you don't enjoy it?"

Running hurts. But hurting, and enjoying, are are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I'm not saying I'm a masochist. Well, maybe I am, maybe we all are, to an extent. I certainly do not enjoy the pain that comes with stopping. And, I don't necessarily enjoy the pain in my calves when I run. I do however, enjoy what the pain of continuing stands for.

The pain of continuing is a sign that I am pushing, hard. And I enjoy that. I enjoy the challenge. I enjoy the hardness.

More than that, I enjoy the consistency. I enjoy that it is always, without fail, difficult to run the way I do. The difficulty, the hardness, is constant, invariable and pervasive, and often, it's painful. But i the thought of the pain that comes with stopping, helps me to push through it. I always finish. And if I must stop, then that pain motivates me to push myself harder tomorrow.

The results are always instant if I have chosen to continue. I feel pain, but it's good pain. It's not the I was in love, and now I'm not; It hurts, so I know I'm growing, pain. It's the I ran 4 miles this morning and it hurts because I pushed myself as hard as I could, and it still hurts, so the only way to make that pain go away, is to run until it is more painful to stop, than it is to keep going.

In life, and in running, I enjoy the give and take of continuing. I give up a lot to continue. I give my time, my body, my mind, my sweat, sometimes my tears. I get pain, but I also get accomplishment, success...and from running, and running alone, a euphoria that I have yet to gain from any other source in my life.