I’m just gonna puke it all up here.

If you zoom in, you can see my little “Suffering Christ” pins I bought to hold the bib on. To Him be all the glory and praise! I know I talk up the Meat Life, but it’s only Jesus that makes me even want to live.

So, I did a thing. And now I’m sitting here, just smiling. And smiling is what I’ve been doing for days in the run up to this…er…this run. I have been so over-the-moon happy to be doing this!

I am having a hard time nailing down why it is that the mere idea of running a race–one which I never had a hope of winning or placing–makes me so happy. For days, I’ve been falling asleep with a smile on my face, thinking “I get to run! I get to race!”

Then last night…well, no smiling happened last night. Instead, I just lay there trying to sleep. You know how it is: when you know you need your rest, it’s really hard to fall asleep. You don’t smile when you’re trying as hard as you can to shut down your excitement and go to sleep. I expect the next race I enter to affect me a little less this way.

Anyhow, I woke up, packed a breakfast for the family to eat while they waited for me at the finish line, and went and ran this thing:

On about 3 hours of sleep. And a weak left ankle. I’m not making excuses. Just telling the sad truth. I was not really in the best shape for this race because of these two things. But I was mentally into it, so I did it anyway. All things considered, my expectation to cross the finish line in an hour and twenty minutes (remember when I said I was slow?) was not too far off the mark. Taking it easy so as not to blow out my Achilles tendon, which I’m working on strengthening, I did it in 1:23! Woot! My average pace was an unimpressive 12 minutes per mile.

I finished ahead of only (I think) five other runners. Almost everybody, even the old people, came in ahead of me. I “lost”. By a LOT. I’m still happy.

And it’s because I’m so grateful. Six years ago (actually, my calendar tells me it was more like seven now), I could not breathe because of asthma. I could not run because I was fat and my right knee hurt all the time. Even if I could have run, I’d have had so much social anxiety that I’d have never considered going out in front of God and everybody and making an absolute fool of myself. But the biggest smiles I’ve smiled when anticipating this race have been the ones where I knew I was going to make a fool of myself. Because it doesn’t matter! I’m a fool? The world needs fools, too!

I had fun. I did something hard. I beat me. I beat Ten Years Ago Me. I even beat Last Week Me:

All personal bests!

Now, nobody is going to look at that and say “Wow! What a natural talent!” Really, I’m 4’11”. I’m not ever going to outpace people with actual legs. But I got faster today. And I’ll get still faster tomorrow. And eventually those numbers might start to look respectable. Maybe. If they don’t? Who cares?

What’s respectable about all this is not the numbers, but how far I’ve come. I’ve worked to be able to do this. I’ve sat at the dinner table with people eating “normal” food and cried because I knew I was never going to enjoy pizza again. I’d love to be able to say it was a tear of joy running down my cheek because I was so glad to be rid of all my health problems, but it wasn’t. I was just sad not to eat pizza anymore. (There are carnivore-keto ways to simulate pizza, by the way. But they don’t agree with my system very well, so I don’t eat them.)

I’ve been lifting weights, rowing, and running for a few years now.

I’ve done the hard work of getting myself to enjoy human contact, after living most of my adult life in abject dread of social interactions. I’m not going to try to make it sound like it was worse than it was. I was able to get the kids to church and playdates and basically live a normal life. But it was miserable. I cried–or cringed–myself to sleep frequently. Social anxiety sucks! But I beat it.

I deserve the respect I have for myself right now. 

As the last two runners came in at the 1:43 mark, I cheered for them as hard as I could. I was as proud of them as I was of the guy who finished in FORTY-FOUR minutes! Maybe those slow finishes don’t mean much to a “real runner”, but we have no idea what they may have overcome to be able to get to that finish line.

They didn’t lose. They just won last.