This past weekend was pretty brutal. Temperatures hovered around zero. It was
sunny but very cold and the ground was covered from a snowfall on Friday. My
training for the weekend involved a long run and a brick (a bike spin followed
immediately by a run). If I waited for the snow to melt it could very well be
February.
I knew I’d have to find some winter traction for my running shoes. Thankfully the
nice folks at FootZone were happy to fix me up and get my shoes outfitted with
nice sheet metal screws. They even showed me what to use (3/8” sheet metal
screws), how to attach them, and how to get them off my shoes once the weather
warmed up. Outfitted and bundled up, I was ready to roll.
Though it was very cold, the sun felt warm and there was no wind. The sky was
clear and the views of the mountains were phenomenal. It felt good to be alive
and I felt strong and happy. I made my way along the deserted and snowpacked
roads and reveled in the moment. I heard a car behind me slow down on my
right. As the car came up along side me I heard the window roll down and a
person in the car say, “See dear I told you.” I glanced over and saw the driver,
an older gentleman, smiling at me. I nodded to him. He said, “I told my wife
when I saw your Laughing Dog Tri emblem that I knew you were an athlete.
Only an athlete would be crazy enough to run on a day like today.” With that he
rolled up his window and sped off. I smiled and felt a warmth work it’s way
across my body. For the rest of the run it may have been cold, but I was
definitely, to quote Dan Patrick, “en fuego”.
Many years ago a high school administrator, who was nothing more than an
oversized adult bully, told me “You will never be an athlete”. They say that
words can be like bullets, and that once they are out, it is hard to control the
damage that is done. For years those words, repeated to me so often when I
was at a fragile stage in my life, rode herd over my thoughts, my mind, and my
actions. I competed in many races but I never thought of myself as an athlete.
Even after I began working with my coach Jaime I still struggled with how I
viewed myself and I lacked confidence in my ability to be successful. It really
wasn’t until after the Leadman that things came into perspective.
Jaime writes a triathlon-related blog on that appears in The Albuquerque Journal.
The Leadman is a long distance race held here in Bend that covers 125
kilometers and it was my first long distance race. In his blog on the race Jaime
referred to me by name as a “fellow athlete”. That simple reference resonated
and hit me like a ton of bricks. For someone of his athletic caliber to consider me
a fellow athlete truly meant something. Three and a half decades of hurtful
words were shed and I felt like I had finally made a breakthrough. As I noted in a
post after I read Jaime’s blog, “35 years ago words were spoken by my coach
that beat me down and hurt me. Yesterday, words written by my coach uplifted
and healed me.”
This liberation forced me to finally question just what an athlete might be. I had
always thought of athlete as a gifted person who did well in a given sport. Author
and news anchor Robin Quivers probably said it best when she described her
first New York Marathon. “Being an athlete is a state of mind. It’s setting a goal
of measuring your performance against it. It means making the outcome and
how you got there matter.”
As I continued on my run on that clear, cold, and crisp day I thought about how
far I had come in the past few months and where my journey was going to take
me as an athlete. I was pleased in knowing that this time out on the road was
part of making how I get to my race outcomes truly matter. With that I picked up
my pace and headed home content in knowing that I now felt that I truly belonged
and that I considered myself an athlete.
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