To Dance With Pain

I felt it come around mile 19...sure and steady, I knew it would...hello old friend.With every foot strike I felt jarring blunt pain shoot up my leg. With every uneven grass patch the tendons in my ankles screamed in utter fatigue. My hips felt deeply torn. My thighs screaming for rest, for oxygen...my whole body was making more lactic acid then it could expel and I felt it build inside and threaten me. Hello old friend.

So I took its hand and danced a little tango with pain...we after all, have a deep relationship. I've sat silently with it in hospital rooms, its arm draped around my shoulders. I've walked beside it as I sought to hold on to expectations stolen from me and lost to circumstances. It's knelt with me in tears as I tried to pick up shattered pieces of my heart and make them into something, anything worthwhile. It has held me in helplessness, and been my companion in silence...pain and I, we know each other well...and I have much to thank you for old friend...it has given me this day, the ability to run this race, and run well.

I never realized as clearly as I did in this last race, how much heart is in my running. Maybe because there never has been so much reason to run. To live, to move. I'm 30 years old, young, but sometimes my heart feels old...pain has done that to me. But pain has also given me something I must thank it for. Endurance, fearlessness. You see, pain has never killed me...it has come, I have met it, looked it in the eyes, and moved on. It's through pain that I have learned a deeper love, a clearer priority, and reason to live. I have nothing to show for peace. We learn so little from comfort. So now, when the siren call for rest and comfort rings deep in my ears, I smile. I'd rather dance with pain, run with it, learn what it has to teach me...then lie in comfort. I do not fear it...I let it grow me.

I've seen it grow others too. It's done its powerful work of conditioning in my childhood companion Courtney. I won't try to pretend that I could ever understand the way pain must have lived his everyday as he watched his infant son fight for life and as he laid him to rest before his second birthday. Pain is a cruel teacher...but in the following year, I've watched Courtney run...13, 13's, in 2013 for his son...and he ran, not just ran...won. Because when you meet pain like that, when you feel it so deeply and you make it out alive...when you let it grow you and you live life open. It gives you something...strength. To battle to the end. To meet it and not fear it. To keep moving because in moving we live, we grow, we learn, we endure, we overcome.

So in the end if I go painfully and slow...don't worry about me. It's just my old friend and I in a slow dance...we might take it a few times around the room for old times sake, I might hold on to it a little longer before I go, to feel it again, to learn what I can...because you see...it'll be our very last dance.