Why do I run marathons?

That’s me over there in the white shirt. ?Six days ago. ?It was a day that I had worked toward since ~ March. ?I’ve done this every year since 2010. ?For about 15 minutes after the marathon, I was sure that it was my last. ?I ran a 1/2 marathon about 3 weeks ago, and it was amazing. ?I loved it. ?I was downright gleeful afterward. ?Not so after 26.2 – especially NYC, which has a very difficult last 5 miles. ?Just walking the ~ 3/4 mile after the finish was painful. ? Why do I do this every year? Resilience Discipline That’s it. ?If you know someone who has run a marathon, you know a person who has chosen to find both of these within themselves. Notice that I don’t say that these people HAVE resilience or HAVE Discipline. ?As Carol Dweck describes in Mindset, resilience is a core component of human success. ?We can learn resilience, and we can un-learn resilience. ?Every day – we are offered opportunities to give up, ease back, let it slide, be sad, be angry, or stop trying to do our best. ?Do you struggle with these challenges? ?Yeh – I thought so. ?Me too. Discipline, not unlike resilience, is hard to find, hard to maintain, and easy to lose. ?In a world burdened by attention deficit trait?(warning: pdf), it’s easy to get sidetracked away from the good habits we try to build. It’s impossible to run a marathon without both of these. ?The marathon is – for me – a way to keep myself focused enough, resilient en...
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