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The Question I Keep Avoiding
It was a Friday morning in 2023 when I laced up my running shoes with a particular determination in my heart. I’m not sure if it was good determination or the kind that creates a knot in your stomach and makes you feel slightly queasy.
I’d decided that morning was the day I would beat my personal record on a 2-mile run. I wasn’t training for anything. I always joke with my running buddies that I wouldn’t pay to enter a race when I can suffer for just the price of shoes.
This was one of those unspoken internal challenges that had grown too loud to ignore.
My friends and I have the prescribed routes we follow based on the day of the week, and they all start the same with a gradual slopes in the first mile and a short flat stretch after that to make up the first two miles. I walked for just a minute to warm up, watching the seconds slowly blink away on my watch before I hit start and sprinted like I was trying to catch a runaway car with a baby on board.
My legs were already complaining before I hit the half-mile mark. To “punish” them, I pushed harder. My lungs burned. The incline seemed somehow steeper than usual that day, and there’s a stop sign at the end of the first stretch that somehow seems to move farther away the faster you run.
