#Running – Lesson 10: Never give up.

Today I ran the Marathon of Valencia.

Things went well, no major problems to report.

If you want to have a visual impression of this marathon, this is the place to be, or better, the Storify to read: http://bit.ly/1HRs6RJ !

Perhaps one tiny little technical problem needs to be mentioned, 20 minutes into the race, my (brandnew) TomTom declared “Storage is full”. Next thing I knew, it refused any further services. So no heartrate monitoring, no pace-monitoring, no nothing.

Lesson learned from this: if it really matters, do NOT count on technology, it will let you down! 🙂

I improved my PB, I never got into problems, and I could keep up my pace. Near the end, I could even speed up. So, this is a good moment to conclude on Learning nr 10. I chose this one: Never give up. Never. This sounds easy, but it isn’t. When I went from injury to injury, many people told me to stop this nonsense. One doctor said: “You don’t have the right muscular structure for marathon running, compared to Kenyan runners“.

Well, that was a correct analysis. Just to be 100% sure, I compared my own muscular structure to that of a Kenyan superstar, and indeed: Doc was right, even without eagle’s eyes, I could spot the 10 differences.

(Source of this quote: http://slodive.com/inspiration/32-motivational-quotes-for-athletes-which-are-sensible ).

So yes, there were (many) moments when I thought: this is not for me. It will never work out. I’d better give up. There are the big moments (an injury), and then there are the – many many – small moments, like “I need to train, but I don’t feel like leaving the couch”.

Perhaps these are the worst, because then you think “It’s OK to let it slip, just once, and I will catch up later”. But then, quite often things slip a little bit more than you anticipated.

Well, looking back in retrospect, running gave me so much. Great weekends in Valencia with Kathelijne, for example ! 🙂

Even if “running” were to end here & now for me, the experiences I could enjoy are priceless. So please, don’t let ANYONE get away with the (silly) observation that your muscular structure is not equal to the one of Kenyan marathoners, meaning: “And therefor, you better start looking for another hobby!”

I guess you need to look at it from a long-term perspective. The way you run, train & race should be sustainable.

For myself, that’s the ultimate ambition, trying to run for as many years as possible … As one of my favorite authhors Murakami exlained:

“I will be happy if running and I can grow old old together”

On the side, the last novel by Murakami which I read was “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, and his years of pelgrimage“.

Very intense. Warmly recommended, and it’s also about never giving up, by the way.

Tsukuru Tazaki is the main character, he wants to understand why his life got off-track many years ago. In high school, two boys and two girls developed a very close friendship. One day, his friends abruptly cut all the lines with him, and this is a complete mystery for him.

He suffers badly from this, they were the most important people/friends in his life.

Later in his life, his (new) girlfriend Sara urges him to deal with the past, “as a grown-up”, and to check out his former friends so as to find out what happened. And so he visits them one by one, on his quest for the truth and his pilgrimage for happiness.

The ending, of course, is for me to know & for you find out.

To end with, whenever you get in trouble, whenever you suffer big time, think about it this way :