Why It’s a Privilege to Be Able to Work as Hard as You Can
“The healthy man has many wishes, the sick man has only one.”
Endurance running continues to teach me new lessons about myself, the world around me, and new ways to see that world. It’s almost funny that something as simple as “running” and “meaning of life” type questions can even be mentioned in the same sentence.
But, for me, it’s why I continue to get up, put my shoes on, and get out the door every morning especially on the mornings that is the literal last thing I want to do. This daily discipline teaches you so much about yourself.
When we commit to the hard daily discipline running brings, it builds a confidence in oneself of being able to handle any other hard things life seems to throw at us.
I’ve made the comparison before, it’s like a suit of armor you slowly build around yourself so that the arrows (hard things) of life now just leave scratch instead of a gaping wound.
This ultra prep has brought my fitness to heights I've never experienced before, but the callus it builds in your mind of the confidence to be able to do hard things is something I am so much more grateful for.
It’s so easy to get bogged down in the monotony of this daily training, and allow yourself to almost resent it to a point. “Wow, I can’t believe I have another 9 miles this morning and it's 20 degrees out. This sucks.”
One thing I could not stop thinking about on my easy run this morning. It really is a privilege to be able to work this hard. It is a privilege my body is able to be pushed this much. I think it’s natural human behavior to not immediately be grateful for a 9 mile morning run in the middle of winter.
But just as easily can we adjust our perspective and instead think about the millions of people who would give anything to be able to get up on their own two legs and go run outside. For me, this grounded me in the fact that I can and should try to be grateful to be on a run in the middle of winter.
Is this always easy? Absolutely not, I mean we are human and imperfect.
But what a privilege it is to be able to build a body and mind that can be strong enough to go run 9 miles in the middle of winter. A privilege to be able to endure the result of voluntary suffering, and the person we become on the other side of it.
Then again, maybe this is just the result of 40 mile weeks for the entirety of the winter months warping my brain. Anyway.
At the end of the day I am the one who is choosing to get up, put my shoes on, and go out on my morning run. So instead of treating it like a chore all of the time, I can choose to find the positive. To find the beauty in the suffering, and who that suffering is helping me become.
I’ve learned that we don't experience life. We experience our perception of life, and our perception can be changed and improved. We can choose to see the good in things, we can choose to turn an everyday negative into a positive.
Sometimes it’s the simplest things in our lives that can teach us the biggest lessons, running is that thing for me, and I hope everyone can find that thing for them, whatever it might be.
Again, we are human, we aren’t perfect and are never going to be. But to me, that means we can never stop getting better, and if you can fall in love with that process of getting better.
It can lead to one hell of a life.
Find Your 1%
GTY
