Inspired by Sydney

I completed my first marathon in 2008 – the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon in September.  It was a nightmare.  A terrible experience.  Don’t worry, this isn’t a race report – I did that already.  In fact, I decompressed about it for weeks.  No, today I just wanted to tell you about someone I met.

At the pasta dinner I sat at a table with a man in his 60s named Sydney, who, I was to learn, was running his 152nd marathon the next day.  He had run his 151st only a week or two before.  He used to be in the US military, and was clearly in wonderful shape – he apparently kept a race schedule like this a lot!

On Sunday morning I ran into Sydney again, at about, oh I don’t know, 32K maybe.  He told me he had blown up and was just trying to muscle through to the end.  My story was similar (well, actually it was that I tried to run after battling an injury for weeks, but that’s a story for another day).  He and I leap-frogged by each other several times – the final time he passed me he grabbed my elbow on the way by and told me we could make it.  And make it we did.

I learned a lot that day, not the least of which I learned from Sydney:  you can be running your first marathon, or your 152nd, you can do all the preparation in the world and be so ready – and still have a bad day.  Does that mean we shouldn’t bother to prepare, or maybe just shouldn’t bother at all?  Of course not!  We often have a bad habit of being very hard on ourselves, playing up our struggles and failures and beating ourselves up about them.  Sometimes we even downplay our accomplishments, chalking them up to a good day, nice weather, perfectly mixed sports drink.  But in the end, it is what we make it.  I don’t know how Sydney looks back at that day.  Luckily my struggle was a hundred life lessons, a huge accomplishment, and more goals for the future.  What about yours?