Celebrating the Year End with a Half Marathon Race

This is s repost from December 2023 about a race I participated in

I did a thing today! 

The race was pretty early and I had to drive about half an hour to the start point and had to set up an alarm and since I never use alarms, my body always reacts by not relaxing a few hours before the alarm goes off! so I was awake well before the race and in an attempt to put myself back to sleep I started writing about how I felt. The following is an edited version of my stream of consciousness at 4am:

Today I'm participating in a half marathon race. That's the first time in a while when I feel kinda ready to run the race with reasonable time. Probably since the beginning of the pandemic or even before when I picked up a knee injury in football. 

In the past few years, there have been many days that I thought to myself that this journey of entrepreneurship throughout a global pandemic was a disservice to my body. In many ways it was, and had I stayed in a more stable lifestyle maybe I would have been healthier now. 

At the same time, I don't think I would have ever become the person I am today had I followed that path. I might be at a disadvantage financially and hurt by anxiety, but I'm also significantly braver and more capable. This drastic experience of going through something dramatic with all highs and lows has helped me understand myself much more deeply. I understand much better how the world works. But importantly, I understand better how I work.

There is something interesting about the human condition: we go through our lives mostly setting into ways that are arbitrary but comfortable. But then somehow some of us find ourselves outside of that norm. Not fitting into the patterns and expectations. And those are exactly the moments when we learn so much about ourselves: when we learn about our insecurities, about our deepest desires, about facing our toughest challenges and fears, about how fragile and vulnerable we are, about how easy it is to become an anxiety driven ball of mess. 

And at the same time, we learn about the human capacity to catch oneself on the wrong track, observe and acknowledge the wrong, and investigate, plan, and execute a redemption. Redemption is fascinating, isn’t it? It's never a straightforward path! It's always this convoluted messy process of discovery. Maybe that's why redemption is such a heroic and ever present theme in our stories.

anyway…

Point is, I found myself not fitting, then I found myself in a mess, but then I reinvented who I was and what I was capable of doing. I did things that I never thought I could. I'm sitting here in the middle of night, a few hours from an activity that's arguably hard to imagine for many people and I'm honestly not phased about it. In fact, thinking about the 2+ hours that I'll be running feels me with joy. A feeling that was dread and literal pain a year ago. And somehow, magically, I've replaced it with enthusiasm and fun.

Even the physical pain of injuries that I've carried since the beginning of the pandemic is mostly gone. I might give credit to how magical the foam roller has been in this recovery, but maybe it's because I've been sleeping better and my body recovers more easily. Or maybe it's because my anxiety level is much more under control and the physical pain of being chronically stressed is removed. Or maybe I just exercised myself back to happiness. Who knows!

Life is a funny thing. You could think yourself into misery. Or you could think yourself into happiness and contentment. I have always envied people who had X and I really wanted that X too, or envied those who didn’t have Y and didn’t have to deal with the burden of responsibility coming with Y. And envy makes you a miserable, small, and sad person.  

Maybe what I learned is that what really matters is not X or Y but how you think about those. Your mindset about it. Oh god, I think hanging out with all these people going on and on about stoicism is rubbing off on me!

Anyway…

Point is, what matters is having a more objective view of X and Y. And more importantly a deeper understanding of your emotional relationship with those. Chances are, in a lot of cases, that relationship is filled with insecurities and fucked-upness. 

Breaking that down and learning the ability to be humble while ambitious, to be a student in one area while a master in another, to be competitive in one context while generous in another, and learning how to transition from one to another is a remarkable achievement.

Maybe that's what I want to learn. 

I thought I wanted so many different X's while what I really wanted was control. Control over who I was and how I behaved. A granular control over how I experienced life and how that influenced how I behaved. Because how I behave is who I am. It is my narrative identity. And not having control over that is the biggest driver of anxiety and that constant nagging, fucked up sense that something is missing. After all, we're extremely contextual animals. Put us in one situation and we're the most well behaved humans. Put us in a different one and we're savages tearing each other apart.

Who knows! Maybe one day I’ll learn that.