most people kick their fitness routines into high gear in the spring, getting their bodies ready to hit the beach and lounge poolside. me? i have spent the summer shuttling kids from one baseball game to another with bouts of furniture stripping and closet deep cleaning thrown in for a little variety.
so this week, i said “enough already.” i dragged my flabby behind out of bed at the crack of early mid-morning to run. yesterday, i begged (nagged, pestered, relentlessly beseeched) jim to go with me. i knew his presence would prevent me from turning my morning run into a coffee and doughnut run.
now if you don’t know, jim is a decade and smidgen older than me. one would think this would put me at an advantage in the physical activity department. one would be wrong when it comes to jim. he is redonkulously fit. i won’t even add “for his age” to that sentence. he is also competitive. extremely competitive. he either beats you or makes you feel like he wasn’t really competing in the first place. either he plays brilliant head games or i am the one who is absurdly competitive and have just been projecting all this time.
when we approached our first hill and i managed to pull ahead of him, it was a moment of pure triumph. at the second hill, jim was in the lead but i managed to get to the top first. i felt awesome…until the side cramp and guilt kicked in. what was i doing?!? i had harassed this man, whom i love dearly, into giving up the coziness of bed only to revel in defeating him. not that he really cared. he knows he can beat me in just about any other category you name, but it got me thinking nonetheless.
i was suddenly imaging my fifty-plus year old self huffing and puffing down the road of the life. i certainly wouldn’t want some nearly forty year old pip squeak making her feel bad. “she is trying her best, pip squeak. back off!”
all this to say, that’s what is so amazing about the real race we are all running. we can all win. we can cheer each other on without fear of defeat. in fact, your success is mine because we are all on the same team. by the same token, our failures are shared as well. that means i should be willing to slow down and help pick you up when you stumble. it means i should be ready to show the kind of grace i am hoping for when i fall short. teammates might give one another advice or point out weaknesses in each other’s performances, but this is done not out of competitiveness. it’s done out of love.
of course, this won’t really prevent me from attempting to smoking jim the next time we run together. guess i still have some growing up to do.
Ah, Crab Apples! 