Where does will come from?

Where does will come from?

The Complete Runner’s Day-by-Day

2013 Log

October 14, 2013

Digging in the past, my love for running first developed during my adolescence, if I remember correctly post an accident in which while riding my bicycle in the hustling teensy weensy streets of Santa Rosa California, about 55 miles (89 kilometers) north of San Francisco. It was an early Thursday morning when I decided to pedal to work instead of driving because I wanted to get a workout plus avoid having to look for a parking spot since it was such a pain on the neck. 

I didn’t see anything when all of a sudden I was impacted by a car who was coming out of an apartment complex and neglected to stop and look both sides to make sure there weren’t any pedestrians or bikers. I flew right off my bike and landed on the sidewalk and somehow ironically I ended up intertwined on the bike right on top of me, hurting my back, scratching myself with the pavement after impacting my right side lower back, waist, hip, leg and arm. 

All of my right side was throbbing and burning and as soon as the ambulance came, I went to get some x rays done. At that time I didn’t get the full glimpse of what the big deal was with my back but my mother explained as she pointed out to my contorted spine.  Needless to say, I was on therapy for a couple of months. I can still dwell upon on what my chiropractor told me locking eyes with me, “You won’t ever be able to do any running or anything high impacting because you may hurt your spinal cord again.” I was not going to let anybody set limitations on MY body, therefore, I obediently and rigorously withstood the painful therapy from day one until the end.

Soon after that, I started playing soccer, then training, shortly after, Cross-Country and Track and Field try-outs and competitions.  The rest is all history. Now I wish I had that youth to recover from this never ending hiatus that is robbing me from mental and physical peace...

Will comes from the desire to maximize one’s own potential by competing against our toughest opponent... the person looking right back at us in the mirror...

Will comes from the coveted Fitness, vanity and fun we all long for...

Will comes from the therapeutical and freedom like feeling we experience every time we break a sweat...

Will comes from the desire to make a difference in our lives...

That will has gone stray but I will soon re-encounter and won’t let go until I yield to balance and self-control once again!

Marty Jerome. 

THe Complete Runner’s Day by Day Log 2013 Calendar

Where does it come from, this determination to lace up your running shoes workout after after workout, year after year? There’s a peculiar madness in it - the repetitive punishment and plodding monotony and occasional bitter disappointment. oh sure, you love the results, whether it’s triumph at the finish line or just the glow of good health. Still, almost all runners draw on some wellspring of fortitude that contains at least a little mystery.

Just ask retired dentist Jon Simpson, who lives in Memphis and has run at least one mile every day since August 30, 1971. That’s more than 185,000 miles. The logistics alone would make this feat seemingly impossible. Running when you’re sick or recovering from surgery? (TAKE IT SLOW.) How about when you’re booked for an all-day flight? (Schedule a layover; run in the airport parking lot.) Simpson isn’t alone. The U. S. Running Streak Association counts 286 members who have run every day for at least one year. Six have run every day for more than 40 years. Few could tell you with any clarity WHY THEY DO IT. 

The same is true of mega marathoners. Eugene Defronzo, who lives in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, has logged more than 400. At 73, he’s not the oldest runner to have completed as many. Norm Frank, 78 of Rochester, New York, was poised to break 1,000 marathons before suffering a stroke. He me it to 965. And plenty of younger runners have now crossed the 1,000 mark - which is about 1,300 more miles than the circumference of the earth. Physiologists will tell you that the fixation on the marathon usually hits men and women in middle age when they want to test their abilities before it’s too late. But this doesn’t begin to explain the tenacity in training required to get them to the starting line again and again.

Some people make a different kind of history through their passion for running. Women now make up 41 percent of people who complete marathons in the U. S. but they were virtually absent in 1967. Kathrine Switzer, now 61, entered that year’s Boston Marathon using her gender-neutral initials, K. V. Switzer. At mile two, a race official was so enraged that a woman was running that he tried to rip her number off her. A scuffle ensued. The incident was caught on camera and it made Switzer an instant hero to women everywhere.

She went on to win the 1974 New York City Marathon, while making the inclusion of women in athletics her lifework. She has started and led programs in 27 countries for more than 1 million women. She became a potent force for getting the Olympics to adopt a women’s marathon. It’s no surprise that she was recently inducted into the National Women’s hall of Fame. Her determination to bring equality to athletics takes no leap of imagination. But none of it would have been possible without her elusive and lifelong love for running. 

For some, it’s a love they return in kind. Julius Achon was 12 when rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army abducted him from his home in the northern city Lira in Uganda. He escaped after three months to join his parents and nine siblings who had survived by hiding in the jungle. Inspired by his uncle, John Akii-Bua, who won a gold medal in the 1972 Olympics in the 400-meter hurdles, Achon began running up to 20 miles a day. Then he began to compete. He won an athletic scholarship in 1990 to run and study in Uganda’s capital, Kampala.

In 1994, he won the 1,500 meter World Junior Championship in Portugal, which landed him a scholarship at George Mason University. His racing career thrived in the United States. He won an NCAA title in 1996 (1,500 meters) and competed for Uganda at the 1996 and 2000 Olympics, making semifinals both times. He eventually found work as an assistant coach in Portland with Alberto Salazar’s elite Nike’s Oregon Project runners. His annual salary: about $20,000.

On a visit back to Uganda, he went for a run one afternoon and found 11 children sleeping under a bust (at first, he thought they were dead). They were all orphaned, their parents shot by rebels. He took them a mile to his parent’s house, fed them, and began sending them whatever he could spare from his meager salary for food, tuition, and medical care. He eventually founded the Achon Uganda Children’s Fund, which through fundraising has begun work on building an orphan’s clinic.

Some runners find that their motivations change abruptly sometimes for tragic reasons. Lyz Best is a widow of Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. She spoke with her husband, Jeremy, by phone for nearly 30 minutes as the plane was being hijacked. He was part of the conspiring passengers that planned to overtake the terrorists. Before that fateful day, she said that she’d been an occasional runner, primarily for fitness, vanity and fun. She and Jeremy often ran together in Central Park when they lived in Manhattan, and then in hiking trails behind their house when they moved to the New Jersey suburbs. She described feeling “free and invincible” during those workouts with her husband.

Immediately after the tragedy, her reasons for running began to evolve. At first, training was cathartic. brining her inner peace when nothing else could console her grief. More than a decade later, she found that running still helped her stay balanced, ameliorating the anxiety and depression that continue to linger. But she admits that tears are often mixed with sweat on some of those workouts. In November 2011, she ran the first New York City Marathon along with 21 others who lost a family member on Flight 93. It was her first. Lyz Best, more than many runners, was able to peer through some of the mystery that keeps us all going.

Marty Jerome. 

The Complete Runner’s Day by Day Log 2013 Calendar