Keep Smiling

I just keep coming up with the life/running analogies, don't I?  Are you sick of them yet?  If "yes," read no further.  Don't say you weren't forewarned.

Like life, sometimes - especially for newbies like me - running is a slog.  The photo above was taken by the encouraging, smiling photographer from Maine Running Photos who shows up at many races across the state and documents them, so that, apparently, nearly every participant can go on line and see photos of themselves taken during the race.  This photo was taken in October at the Waterford Fall Foliage 5K toward the end of the race.  I did ok at that race, in spite of negotiating a fairly long hill toward the end.  I would not call this race a slog...but I was definitely glad to be approaching the finish line.  My time, relative to the rest of the pack, was poorer for my first 10K last weekend, but that's ok.  I now have a time to beat - one that I hope will be easy to beat by this time next year.

As I scrolled through the photos on Maine Running Photos website, looking at my race pics from both this fall's 5K and 10K, I noticed that in each of them I was smiling.  It didn't matter that I was kind of tired during the last mile of the 10K.  It didn't matter that I'd just run a long hill in the 5K.  I was just happy to be out there, and even at my turtle pace, running is better than...well...not running.

So it is with life.  (Here comes that analogy...) 

Today's training run was a slog.  Six miles of slooooooooog.  My heart rate during the first mile was at times  exceedingly high, or else the monitor was malfunctioning - who knows?  My legs and breath simply never engaged.  I walked some of the hills on beautiful, but somewhat brutal on this day, Mt. Mica.  In short, it sucked.  And I probably contributed to this sucky experience by letting the chatter in my head go over-analogizing.  "This sucks.  Why don't I feel good?  I felt pretty good for Saturday's 10K - what the f**k is going on now?  Isn't this just like my life right now?  Real estate's a slog - can't any freakin' contract go smoothly, or go at all, for that matter?  The bills keep coming.  I need a second job...but not one that's going to exclude my practicing real estate.  The damned casino question passed and Paul Lepage is governor - my beautiful Maine is going to hell in a hand basket and fast.  I have friends working through their own problems and it hurts me to see it.  Oil prices are rising just in time for me to heat my big old drafty house for six months.  Why does everything have to be so damned hard????"

Well, because. Sometimes running's a slog.  Sometimes life's a slog.

Recently I put up some Scrooge-like Facebook status about not feeling too excited about the upcoming holiday season.  A dear, lifelong friend pointed out that I pretty much needed to get over that bit of negativity because as long as we're "on the right side of the grass,"  aka not "pushing up the daisies," we ought to be happy.  And, of course, she was right. 

Running is always better than not running.  Living is always better than not living.  And there are a lot of ways we fail to live, not just by literally dying.  We fail to live when we forget that living itself is a miracle.  We fail to live when we stop smiling.  The instant we allow negativity to take over, life feels like a roller coaster car zooming ever faster down the back side of the hill.  I've been doing some serious backward zooming lately.

I am smiling in the images captured by Maine Running Photos.  I'm smiling because I'm happy to be out there.  Running reminds me with every foot fall and every breath - and every twinge of pain or monster hill - that I am alive.  I may be slow and uneven in my performance now, but if I persevere my way will be increasingly swift and smooth.  And if it is not it will not be for lack of trying. So in life, and on the roads and trails, I will keep smiling.