Marathons and Sprints

The time has finally come to get rid of the running shoes I used in April 2005 to run the London marathon, and that I insisted to keep and use out of affection and nostalgia ever since.

When I took them out of the wardrobe and I looked at them it once again hit me what these shoes have meant for me.

I decided to run the marathon on a spring morning in Nottingham, after having gone for 'my first run in ages' with my colleague Claire and realising I could not jog for more than 5 minutes. I had always declared that I could not run to save my life and eventually I had turned that into a reality.

It is so true that we create our own world through language, by telling ourselves and others what 'we are good at', 'what we are crap at', 'what we can or cannot do'. We literally speak in or out our own limits.
By creating and reinforcing those limits we make them true.

And here I was, a healthy 25 year old who could not jog for a minute without having to deal with a myriad of physical and psychological blocks.

That morning in Nottingham I declared a totally different future, a future that I could not ever have imagined until a few seconds earlier. Just like that - I created the possibility of that future.

I would run the London marathon.

Training for the marathon was such a mammoth task 'for a bad runner' like me. It took everything I had. The biggest part was to learn how to think that I could do it. My body followed.
That 2005 winter I trained through the snow, through the long Saturday runs by the Thames in Hammersmith, through giving up a big chunk of my social life.  

The day of the marathon came and went. It was a great day.

So much has happened since that April 2005, and when I looked at those shoes for the last time on a Sunday morning in Sydney in August 2013 I could not help but thinking about the marathons and sprints of  life - of the great challenges we face or willingly take on to become better, and how this change sometimes happens at a sudden, sometimes it happens over time.

These shoes are like relics reminding me of all the extraordinary things that have happened and the adventures that are yet to come.

And Never Rain.

I guided you through fifty broken valleys,

pretending that I really knew the way.

We saw some rabbits eating bears and flowers;

and cats drinking sunshine and never rain.

You never looked surprised

                                        or frightened at those sights.

You never seemed to care for good and evil.

I found the shades too cool – the sun too hot.

Our breaths were weak and feeble -

the air a hazy stench of honey and rot.

Yet still we kept just walking,

in silence – or barely talking,

as though nothing could touch our lonely embrace.

As though nothing could quench our endless thirst.

We went through fifty valleys,

You and I, through fifty valleys,

our path barely defined

by loud church bells on a Sunday in Darlinghurst.

Piero Bassu, August 2013.