Running to Think

When I don't run, I don't think. 

I was a child when my father was training for his first marathon. I have the vivid image of him running for a distance I could not begin to comprehend at the time, when everything looked much bigger than it really was. Probably my father too. The joy of finishing a marathon was the only thing that I couldn’t understand and I kept underestimating for so many years. That was until I finally ran my own marathon, and suddenly, everything began to make sense again. After crossing 26 mile mark, my father changed.
He became more poetic whenever he talked about running. I remember that he said once “a marathon is just like life”. I never got the meaning of that quote and again I underestimated it. As of late, I think I found out the meaning of that phrase.
A marathon is like everyday life in the sense that we can appreciate our efforts only at a certain point: Only when we stop running. That memory kept me curious about running and endurance sports to the point that I wanted those words to be meaningful, for me. That was the main reason for which I became a long distance race walker. In Italy that was a big thing at the time. There were so many good schools to learn the not-so-natural technique and strategies to do it faster without breaking the rules and being disqualified. Heal on the ground and blocked knee are the two rules that make race walking one of the most deleterious sporting activities that a kid can get into. I was really good at that. I won a number of regional and interregional championships, I got the first position at the national criterium of race walking in Caorle (Venice), back in 1996.

My future was already planned as a professional race walker when I had to deal with the first injuries. The older I became the longer I trained and the more I was exposed to more or less bad injuries that played against me and shattered my dream of participating in the olympic games of Athens 2004. Distance running was the patch in my career as an athlete. I tried to fill my life with that. That was the only thing I could do.
 My bad physical conditions forced me to stay at home, putting me in a state of depression since no other sport was on my wish list. I hated football, and still do, I had no feelings for tennis and the like and I never wanted to play in teams in general. Running has always been the mirror of my personality, the place where I've always been comfortable, the peaceful path that always made me feel at home. Especially when I was far from my real home and family.
 So many times I've been struggling with the usual difficulties of everyday life. As a guy who's always been abroad, living on his own, no family, no relationships whatsoever, very few friends and too many goals to focus on, I was barely paying attention to the details, forgetting that life can start from the finish line, if only I could stand still on my feet. That's what I found in running.
The ability to survive until it's over, till the finish line. Maybe that's what my father meant with "a marathon is just like life". Maybe, as I will tell him one day, life is a marathon of which we have no clue where the finish line is.

Be Great, Powerful Beyond Measure