My dad looked right at me, that special look on his face that I knew to take seriously:
“Are you crazy?” he asked.
I took half a second to reply, knowing the answer clearly.
“Yes” I replied, matching his serious question with my very real answer.
He paused for a moment, nodded his head, dropped the issue, and proceeded on talking about his own news.
A couple hours later we were all in the kitchen discussing the recent decision I had made. The team was in agreement. I was, indeed, crazy for making this decision. Still, the decision was made and now my family was showing up for me.
How could they help? They wanted to know.
Being my overly-independent self, I didn’t often ask them for help. But this time I knew I would need it. I had relied on my own self for these sorts of things before and gotten by, and now I had escalated the situation to a point where I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it alone.
I needed help, and I was elated and honored that my family was here, offering to help me with the journey once it showed up later this year.
And until then, well, I had a lot of work to do on my own.
–
These past few weeks since I made the objectively crazy decision to *gulp* run a 100 miler this summer (100 miles WITH 22,000 feet of elevation GAIN and another 22,000 feet coming back down) I’ve been spending a lot of time asking myself an important question:
WTF?
Okay, well that and a more useful question:
Why?
Why on Earth have I decided to continue to up that distance as I continue to move forward through my life as someone who I think now officially qualifies as an ultra runner.
I asked myself it many times in the days following that big decision.
I asked myself that question repeatedly a couple weeks ago when I decided to run a road half marathon for “training purposes.”
Just yesterday, I found myself looking deeply within for that answer after finishing up a two hour run in the freezing weather, having suffered from a serious flare up of a chronic injury partway through. I was frozen, in pain, and down in the dumps about not being able to heal this lasting wound.
It felt like a good time to consider, again, why I felt I needed to be out doing this sort of thing.
It’s a question I’ve been spending lots of time working to put into words.
But to be honest, words aren’t all that necessary, because what matters most is that deep knowing inside – the one that whispers quietly yet so clearly that this is the thing I want to be doing.
This is the thing that makes me feel most alive – fully connected to the world around me and fully connected with my own self.
Still, articulating thoughts and feelings into words also happens to be one of my favorite things, so for the next few weeks I will be playing around with putting the experiences into posts – all in the name being as clear as possible on my own whys, but also, perhaps, in helping us all to think about our own whys that drive us to do the things we do in this one remarkable life.
