Friday, October 30, 2009

Life Lesson # 53, Humility

Disappointment arrives when expectations have not been met! (Lesson #24)

When expectations are not met, it is sometimes followed by a sense of humility as we come to recognize the current level of expectation may have been well over estimated.

The latest example of this comes from last week’s runs. It had been a busy week and between sick kids, sore bodies (you know, the one I haven’t been listening to) and a lack of sleep I was unable to get out for any weekday runs’. C did an awesome map for us and we were excited about the craziness of running a new distance of 14-15 miles, there was no consideration given to the preceding nights plans’. This just happened to be the 10km Nike human race. Along with ignoring my tight calf from the Sunday before and G was still being careful of her knee, we really were looking forward to the long run in the morning.

Sunday morning arrives and we are our usual ½ asleep selves, until we get moving where the laughter and the moods begin to rise. The pace is nice, possibly a bit faster to start, and all seems well as we look forward to our longest run yet. C was taking us on some new trail that was nice to run on. We saw the usual bunny along the way (we have many of those critters in the city) and we were pleasantly surprised to watch a deer cross our trail. We kept checking with each other to see how our bodies were managing, and all seemed fine (usually is in the land of denial). Then about mile 7 a confession was made and it was time to head home. Our bodies had decided we were ignoring them and the bodies were going to set us straight, weather we liked it or not!
I’m not sure that the night before I even questioned that I would not be able to run the full 14 miles. As we turned back for home I felt like I had just fallen on my face into the mud.

I have been
humbled!

I cannot force my body to go a distance I have not trained it for, not without injury anyway. I will still chalk it up to a good run, as the many lessons I learned from it are useful and will be with me for a while.
So with a pride that has been appropriately run over and but back into its’ place I will hit the trails running with a new respect for learning the language my body is speaking to me.


Nicole

No comments:

Post a Comment