Intangible Rewards

It's been exactly two weeks since the race.  Good sense tells me that posts about running are off limits.  But I never claimed to have good sense all the time. (Stay with me here, this isn't really a post about running.)

It took about a week to get over the soreness of the race.  I did my first run afterwards on the the following Monday - eight minutes of painful and tender hobbling along.  By Friday, everything was back in order.

Of more significance, however, has been my state of mind since the race.  I anticipated it happening...it's a very common occurrence.  I spent months having been consumed with the training and the anticipation of the race, and then, on December 9, it's done.  As I fully expected, the euphoria of completing the task was very short lived.

If you have followed my blogging about the race, you may have been tempted to admire the effort of the training.  But here's an ironic take on that.  The effort came easy, because there was a clear task at hand.  In training for such a huge task, there is no option to skip a run.  I considered every run as absolutely necessary, even the short ones.

Now that a clear goal is no longer there, it is much easier to skip runs.  It takes much more effort now to run than it did before the race.

And herein lies some sort of great life lesson, which I am still working to solidify in my mind.

The lesson has something to do with the value of plugging away at some effort that is completely worthy - like routine running, but without the marathon goal.  Routine running has a long list of positive effects.  The reward is not necessarily immediate or tangible.  But it is worthy, nevertheless.

There must be a whole bag full of such endeavors.  They are completely worthy (much more so than running), but their reward is not necessarily immediate or tangible.  It is these things that require an incredible amount of mental energy.  But you may never be able to connect a short term goal with them, such as a marathon.

March 2006

A few things come to mind, but I'm sure there are more.  The first and most obvious one is child rearing.  Day after day after day, parents (mostly mothers) plug away at one of the most worthy endeavors of all - the influencing of another little human being - expending incredible amounts of energy.  How that little person turns out has everything to do with the day to day grind of motherhood.  Of course, this is not to say that the mother is responsible for everything the child does later in life.  But she has a position of influence like no other person in the world.  For the most part, she has no big goal like a marathon that can be finished.  She just plugs away, never having the satisfaction of passing some point of completion.  She is always a mother.

Another thing that comes to mind is work.  Yes, it is rewarding for some.  But for others, it requires an incredible amount of energy to do it day after day, with no great reward.  Sure, there is immediate financial compensation, but perhaps it is just adequate, or worse - less than adequate.  But they plug away anyway, because it is worthy.  This is more admirable than running a marathon.

Perhaps something else comes to your mind.  Perhaps you have watched someone who presses on day by day in some endeavor which has no immediate or tangible reward.  And you admire them for that.  In the Spirit of Christmas, perhaps you should tell them.