Over the past few months, Kimberly and I have been talking “what ifs” a lot. We’ve both made big and small decisions that changed the trajectory of our lives. I often think about the magic alignment that had to happen for us to even be together:
We both had to attend not just Georgia Tech, but the same campus ministry at Georgia Tech
I had to transfer out of Tech to get an English degree at a small regional college
Kimberly had to intern at aforementioned campus ministry
I had to go to grad school, which put me in Montana
We both had to deconstruct our Christian belief systems
COVID had to happen
Kimberly had to consider going to grad school and post about it on Instagram
I had to respond to her Instagram story about going to grad school
I had to move from Montana back to Georgia during COVID
I had to visit her Memorial Day Weekend in 2020 (happy four years, Kimberly!)
Of course, there were other things in between all of these things like us following each other on Instagram even though we didn’t know each other that well in college and Kimberly not going to aforementioned grad school because then she would have moved away. I wouldn’t have been able to see her Memorial Day weekend if I hadn’t borrowed my dad’s Jeep for the weekend, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if my parents weren’t out of town and had taken my mom’s car.
It’s all very convoluted, but I think that very specific set of events led to the very specific life I have right now, and if someone came to me and said I could change any one of those decisions, I think I would say no. If I changed something, I don’t think I would have the life I do right now.
I think about this in the context of running, too. For the most part, I cold turkey stopped running after high school, losing a lot of fitness in the process. Sometimes I feel frustrated with my current fitness level, because it could be better.
I could have kept running, and if I kept running I’d be thinner and faster and stronger. Maybe my endurance would be better (probably) or I’d have already run a marathon by now (maybe) or I wouldn’t be meticulously digging through half marathon and marathon race guidelines trying to find the race time cutoffs, because I need them to be very generous (definitely).
At first, when I started running again, I thought I would just lace up my sneakers and hit my high school PR. I appreciate my own optimism, but I should have known better. Not being able to run a 5k without stopping brought on equal frustration, because I could only think, It’s not running if I need to stop and walk.
I’m never very gentle with myself because I believe I should be good at everything. When there’s work involved, well, the frustration grows and grows. Wouldn’t life be much better if we didn’t have to start slowly and build to the next thing? I felt the same way when I started writing, thinking that I never needed to edit or revise a first draft; everything I wrote was New Yorker ready. I got a major wake-up call in the first fiction workshop I took in college.
I remember telling Kimberly all of this when I first started running again, and she looked at me, with kindness, and said, “You’re not in high school anymore, and you’re still running, even if you have to walk.”
Her words, while wise, did not satisfy my own dissatisfaction with being slow and not having enough endurance to run without stopping, pushing me into a loop where thoughts ran circles around my head regretting my disinterest in fitness 10 years ago. If only 18-year-old me knew what would happen, how unfit she would be, how slow she would be, and how embarrassing that was, then maybe she would have kicked her ass into gear and run laps around the Georgia Tech gym or something.
And maybe the tension I feel in myself about all of this stems from the fact that I used to be good at running and now I’m bad at running, according to my own standards. Also, I was on the varsity cross country team, I must have been a “good” runner.
Turns out I misremembered a lot about high school cross country, including that in my conference championship meet my senior year of high school I finished 19 out of 25. In an invitation the same year, I finished 172 out of 183. By the standards of these races, I was not a good runner, and yet, I ran anyway. Whether that was out of desire to not go to basketball conditioning or because I just liked running, I don’t remember. Maybe I liked that cross country, while a team sport, is also individual. Sure, our team wants to win the meet, but can I run just a little bit faster than the last race?
I’ve learned to embrace where I’m at. I’m not the runner I was in high school and God knows if I’ll ever finish a 5k in 26:51 again, but it doesn’t matter. I’m celebrating where I’m at and what the body I have now can do, and it’s a lot.
In the past year, I’ve set “PRs” in the 5k and 10k, and have come to realize that the joy and competition in running comes with competing against myself. It’s going to take work. There will be days ahead where getting up to do marathon training will sound like the worst thing I could ever do, but I’m going to do it anyway.
If I never stopped running in high school, maybe I wouldn’t be here now. Maybe crossing the finish line in November wouldn’t mean so much to me. I’m not just overcoming the physical challenge of running, but the knowledge that, most of the time, things that are worth it require hard work.
Love everything about this.