The cool, morning breeze invoked sleepy tears in my eyes and I felt a quick shiver as my body reacted to the shock of the cold air on my brown, sun-worn legs.
A pretense of what I was to do in the next hour to two crept in my mind; I blocked it out almost instantaneously, a skill I had perfected over the years.
One deep breath. Then with a clear mind, I disappeared into the dark trail. A newborn antelope crashing through the brush and old fallen leaves that lined the floor of the trail. Clumsy, yet efficient and graceful. I try not to let the thought of what my chances of survival would be if I were actually a creature of the wild. But sometimes I glance around and feel the fear of hunters; it stimulates the adrenaline reaction I try very hard but fail to control. The legs move faster, and oxygen is permeating throughout my body and into my veins just fast enough to supply the muscles with life yet let me forget that I am breathing. The legs are still sore from yesterday, and my heart feels heavy. A forgotten soul, now I am on my own, free to fill my ninety minutes with anything I pleased. But I reach the sun-lit portion of the trail. The rhythm is an unwavering, synchronized, symphonic beat. I feel afloat as I continue to ride on the previous bout of adrenaline.
The thoughts coming into my mind are no longer full sentences, just fragments or song lyrics, key words that come one when my body is in auto-pilot.
Was I being punched in the stomach? What was it? Was it fear? Fear of where I was heading? That if I would give in? That when it grew difficult I would let it be easy? That when the decision came I would solemnly choose the easy route? I didn’t need to keep this gut-wrenching pace. I could ease it up just a little.
But that would mean a grizzly death by the hunter for the young antelope.
These thoughts conjured yet another bout of adrenaline and the legs pounded the soft trail faster. And following my contemplation, I choose to run faster.
Because I realize the fear only diminishes when I reached that decision point, at the looming limit of bodily capacity. When I wondered if my body could continue and I stubbornly decided there was no decision, that I would persist. That is the only time when the fear is non-existent. At that moment. So far away, so seemingly unattainable, so difficult. But That is the moment I strive to reach every time I set foot on the trail, road, sidewalk, track, pavement, grass, gravel, or dirt road. To fulfill this fear and yield a feeling of self-accomplishment, to feel I tested, and I passed.
So I pushed harder, the heart pounding deep inside somewhere, supplying the far extremities of this corpse flying in the dark woods. I went to a place of deep uncomfortableness and true endurance.
The air through which I was gliding grew sticky and uncomfortably warm and my legs felt heavy from the growing lactic acid. My breathing felt uncontrollable but I remembered “ET has emphysema” and left one leg forward after the other. Through the unimaginable strain I smiled.
two running foodies 