Your success in life and work will be determined by the kinds of habits that you develop over time. Brian Tracy Eat That Frog! page 4
It was my slowest marathon. My hopes of running a sub 4 hour ended the week before the race when I ran a fast 20 at a sub 4 pace. I knew I was in trouble almost from the start. Deep in my hips, both sides, a dull pain.
A week later the X-rays revealed osteoarthritis on both hips. Bone on bone. The Doc told me I had the hips of an 80 year old. I was 43 at the time and the story I told myself and others in large part revolved around my running. When I asked what was I to do the Doc suggested glucosamine and condition and that I lay off running for a while.
A while? How long is that?
He said Your body will tell you.
Not what I wanted to hear.
So after 15 years of running 20 miles a week I went to riding a bike. You may think, that’s not bad. Yes it is. For a runner to ride is like a writer taking up writing software for a new database, a chef as a bus boy on a cruise ship.
But I tried. I rode the levees on the south end of the San Francisco Bay at lunch, the hills south of Santa Cruz near Manresa Beach. But it didn’t work for me.
I tried running in a swimming pool. Waist deep churning while guys swam laps and housewives did water aerobics. This lasted for me about five months.
Then it was speed walking, but I never seemed to get the right butt wiggle to get up to cruising speed. But I tried.
After about a year of this wandering in the wilderness of the land in between I just stopped all that foolishness.
My soul took a dive. My story, the running – I stopped telling it. It really was depressing, like a long winter.
Five years after my last marathon, I was dead to that dream of running again. Like Moses five years after fleeing Egypt, he was dead to the dream of senior leadership. Dead. Resigned to something less than his dream.
It was in that desert Moses came to a burning bush. Same for me.
What happened was after five years I laced up my Asics 2010 Trail shoes and went for 3 miles. It killed me. Not my hips but my lungs. My legs. And my feet? They had become soft like babies feet. The calluses of years of a base of 15-20 miles a week – gone.
But my hips?
No pain.
The next day, another 3. No pain.
I backed off for the next week or so to slow trail runs at Nicene Marks forest or the bluffs at Wilder Ranch in Santa Cruz. Those slow runs filled my soul! Each run gave a little hope. The burning bush for me.
I went back to the Doc, more X-rays, and the results were the meniscus had miraculously grown back. No more bone on bone!
Slowly I regained the rhythm of a runner.
My soul had gone through a similar journey. A wilderness journey of about five years, brought on by neglect.
The discipline I needed to regain my runner’s being mired the discipline I needed to regain my soul.
You see, after we have mastery, rhythm, and powerful rituals and the traction these bring – after we lose them for such a long time that we truly are dead to them it takes work to get it back.
It is in this beginning stage when all bets are off as to whether we can regain that which was lost.
Colin Fletcher put it this way.
A year passed before I could start my journey.
Perhaps it was just as well: there is no test quite like the erosion of time for finding out whether you really want to do something. If the dream you have dreamed can survive untarnished through a year of doubt and discouragement and frustration and all the drawn-out detail of research and planning and preparation then you can safely assume that you want to go through with the project. Colin Fletcher The Man Who Walked Through Time, p 9
So it was with me and it will be with you.
It is in this furnace of the wilderness, the land in between where our intentions meet the low lying fruit. It is here where the work comes in. When you are spinning with routine, it is never work to lace up and go for 8. But when it’s January and the only time you have to run is 5 am and it’s 38 degrees and it’s raining and you know, you know that if you don’t run today then you’re going to slip back into giving up on the dream of getting it back.
This is where the work comes in.
Whether it’s working on your marriage, learning new skills to leverage your future at work, driving a stake through the heart of that vampire called addiction that has your knees nailed to the floor. It is precisely at this point when it is work. When no one else is watching and you decide to do what needs to be done.
That is work.
Whatever your dream, you can get it back.
Whatever you have lost, you can find it.
What do you want?
When will you begin?