To run or not to run?

I read a book review and on a whim put the book on hold at the library and forgot about it. When the kids and I picked up our twenty-five books the other day, the novel was mixed in with books about Turkey and sign language videos. Last night, I managed to finish the novel about a distance runner. It was not my usual fare, and I could have done without several parts of the book, but it got me to thinking. That and part of an article in Runner's World.

Distance running is all about pain and learning to enjoy and manage the pain. I would even go so far as to say that distance runners relish and delight in a certain amount of pain. Maybe you could say that they don't enjoy the pain for its own sake, but they love the outcomes achieved when they push through pain that their minds say that they can't survive.

I used to enjoy the pain and also the power that came from disciplining my body to do things that others thought were crazy; I remember running just for the joy of running and winning. Now running is my escape, the place I go to be myself. It is a guilty pleasure. My mind argues both for and against the merits of investing the time, the sweat equity, that are necessary to run races to win. So I continue to run and to wrestle with the place that running should have in my life. I want to be a runner once again, but fear the investment that I already know it will ask.

Reading that book made me sad. It reminded me that I was once a runner too.