Thursday, March 14, 2013

Why I Run

Sometimes people ask me what made me decide to train for a race. Beyond the obvious reason to attain better physical condition is the fact that I really get a kick out of identifying and overcoming personal challenges. Running a half marathon is merely an arbitrary goal, the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it all, it is not running that I am after but rather the feeling of making continuous progress and ultimately succeed in doing something I find difficult or something I wasn’t able to do before. I might not enjoy every run or every workout but there is satisfaction in proving to myself time and time again that I can put in my best work on the days I feel like it and on the days I dread it. It cultivates determination, persistence, accountability and discipline. Any improvement in physical conditioning resulted from reaching and meeting my goal is just a positive byproduct of pursuing something that is challenging and meaningful to me.


Looking back this is precisely how I have gone after many things in life, with vigor and focus. It is how I put together my applications for law school, attacked the LSAT, passed the brokers exam, became a Certified US Export Compliance Officer, tripled my salary in three years during an economic downturn, got started in international trade, traveled around the world, learned tango, completed two concurrent degrees, got accepted to the best music schools in the country, gained awareness of art, poetry and literature, exceled in AP classes and learned English after moving to this country at 13 years old. None of those things were easy and not all of them with great outcomes. I am a doer. When someone starts to tell me more of what they don’t do instead of what they do pursue I start losing respect for them


Slowly I am beginning to see that happiness for me is to be deeply immersed in the act of the pursuit. The object, secondary and the outcome, inconsequential. The older I get the more I realize that life is not about which path you choose but how you carry out the choices you’ve made. The days of vexing over where my passions lay are now becoming more distant in the rare view mirror. I take comfort in knowing that passion will follow when the pursuit is done with vigor.


I had a quarrel with someone recently on the difference between recreational running and race training and what personal significance it had on me. The older I get the more I see there are all kinds of people in the world. Although I have high standards for myself and everyone around me I also realize that not everyone has had the same privileges I have had. The study of economics further illustrated to me that nothing can be said with absolute certainty. This is not to say that I am a skeptical person. I will forever be stubborn in my own ways with strong opinions and beliefs. However, I try not to impose those on anyone else or rule out any alternative possibilities. A person with common sense sees one logical path between A and B. A person with rich imagination can justify many paths. Overtime I have become less judgemental. The next step is perhaps to stop judge people who judge people.

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