I burst out into cheers and huge smiles when I got the official text message with my running finish time... 47:57. I was in the car when I got it and I just about freaked out my friend who was sitting beside me. Instantly her eyes went big and she looked up at me. "I got it!" I yelled out.
I was so happy, so relieved.
Earlier I had told the girls that I was going to give it my absolute all. "It's just 49 minutes of hell and then I can relax the rest of the day -- 49 minutes is really nothing". But I was wrong in that it really was something and it wasn't 49 minutes. It was barely 48, pure bonus there, but it definitely was hell. One of the most impressionable quotes that continually helped me to push myself was one said by the great Mohammad Ali. He said, "I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'" I thought of this today, while out on the race course.
At the 3km point my ankle started acting up and I seriously contemplated whether I should even continue or not. I yelled out in pain when I stepped down on it awkwardly and WOW asked me if I wanted to stop. My choices were to continue, risk injuring it more and possibly end the race with a brutal time and injured ankle that would take me out of boxing for a bit, or simply give up now and take a bad result time. Either way I figured both choices would result in a bad time, me not getting my set goal time. I convinced myself to give myself 1km to come up with the best answer.
"Push yourself to failure and you will succeed", this quote flashed before me on my phone screen.
I decided to continue on. I was going to push myself to failure, injury or not.
At the 4km and 5km mark, two people bumped into me and at the 7km water stand I totally collided with WOW President and I ended up clearing the table of several cups of water with my butt. I can laugh at it now but it wasn't so funny at the time. It was my mistake, I should have slowed down instead of risking further agitating my ankle. Four painful kilometers earlier I had contemplated quitting but I wasn't about to quit now with only three kilometers left and having already completed seven.
At 9km, WOW reminded me that we were on our last kilometer so he started clapping for me and yelling, signaling for me to hurry up and boot it. I was booting it as fast as I could go and I didn't know whether I wanted to cry or puke. My head wanted to fly like the wind to that finish line and I could envision myself blazing past the line but my little Polish legs were going as fast as they possibly could. I felt like the Roadrunner off the cartoons, with my legs spinning and spinning but my body not quite going as fast forward as them.
It was a brutally hard course and even the beautiful scenic display of it being mountain side didn't take away from that fact. It was a roller coaster of a route with more ups than downs it seemed. Snickers had warned me about the route and asked if I wanted to check it out online or perhaps drive to the race location before race day but I knew it wouldn't change anything. I still had a time goal and knowing the route or not knowing it would make no difference. Perhaps it was better that the course was harder than anticipated and harder than my first attempt. I was only deserving of good butt-kicking reminder to try all that harder. I learned a hard lesson today, the lesson being that I should just go all out and push myself to failure, give it my absolute all the first time, so that there doesn't have to be a second time. Not always is there a second time.
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