Damsel Diaries 11 years ago Damsel Diaries // Just Do It
“Just Do It,” I cheesefully teased myself as I sat awake at 2am going through the pros and cons of running the Nike Women’s Marathon in San Francisco in October. I gotta be honest, the only real “con,” as I saw it, was that I would have to actually go running regularly, as well as give up my healthy one to two glasses-of-wine-a-night addiction.
Lying in bed until all hours of the night – that is when I typically dream up lofty goals for myself such as taking up sewing, or flying an airplane. Sure I’ve never opened the sewing machine box after it arrived at my doorstep and 18 hours of solo flying lessons does not equal a license. My long list of extra curricular activities looks something like this: sewing, stamp collecting, painting, krav maga, piano, gardening, pottery and horseback riding {to name a few}. But then there’s running. Not that running is so much a hobby per se, but running is always the one thing that I have find myself to continuously coming home to. It’s the one place where I can truly get lost. Isn’t that what a hobby is supposed to be all about? And, between you and me, it is the only time in which I can really just be alone. It is good to be alone. I like to be alone.
“Knowing how to be alone is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” – Bell Hooks
As I sat up weighing the many pros against the very few cons I came to the realization that at the 10th mile, once I have stepped into a new personal distance record, it’s going to purely depend on my own will. It really boils down to one thing which I recently read in an incredible book by Haurki Murakami called “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.”
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.”
I will be documenting my experience running, along with other personal entries, in a new series called Damsel Diaries. I hope you enjoy it.
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