Being present to failure

This weekend, I ran a race. I wasn’t that invested in the race, I just ran it because my friend invited me to. We started the race and I immediately realized that this race, was going to be hard. It was up hill, up a steep hill, that appeared to never end.

As soon as we hit this first hill, people around me started walking. I was tempted to join them but I knew that once I started it’d be really hard for me to start running again. Since I knew I had a long race ahead of me, I set a goal to just keep running. As long as I did that, I’d feel like I had done my best.

But then we hit some stairs- stairs that you really couldn’t run. I let myself walk because honestly, I had no choice. But then, at the top of the stairs, it was still steep so I just kept walking. And then we got to more stairs and I thought “Aw man! If I had known there were stairs again after that steep part, I would have tried to run, knowing I’d have a break on the stairs…” And so I decided that at the top of the next stairs, I would run the rest of the race, no matter what. And I ran, for a while, and it was hard, but I stuck with it and I felt good because I stuck with it.

Then we got to another steep hill. I was tired, my legs were dead, everyone around me was walking, so I joined them. At first, it was okay, it felt more normal, more like my body was working instead of being worked. But I also felt like I had given up. I had agreed that I would run no matter what and here I was walking. I considered starting to run again but it was even steeper now, and the ground was a little crumbly, so I just kept walking. I hung my head a bit and looked at the ground in front of me.

But then I thought, “Are you doing your best? Are you doing what needs to get done?” And I realized that I wasn’t- not because I wasn’t running, but because I was just walking. I wasn’t being present to my walking, I was just dragging myself up the hill. And then I thought, “You know what, you can’t run right now but you can walk, so walk well. Put yourself in to what you can do instead of beating yourself up over what you can’t do.” I focused on the ground in front of me, noticed my body, and walked well. Honestly, I probably was doing the exact same motion with my body but my intent was there and so I actually felt like I was doing my best.

And I thought about this, about how doing your best might change as conditions change. It’s not necessarily giving up on the goal that you set; it’s that when you find yourself not meeting it, you don’t give up there, you put yourself whole heartedly into where you are and do your best there.

We got to the top of the hill and I started running again. We crossed the saddle of the ridge and I’m pretty sure I saw Green Gulch in the valley below me. I did a running bow to it, grateful to have this support in my life, and ran up the next hill. Fortunately, it was mostly down hill after that.