Here Endeth The Lesson

Its over. The target race. The first 50miler. Culmination of all the hard-ass training.

Turns out the finish was nothing like the training or the run itself. It was a great 3months of real hard training. It was over 11 hours of extraordinarily good feeling during the race itself. But the finish was largely inadequate. I stopped because the race was over and the organizers were wrapping up the course, and our crew had called it a day. It was over, and that was it. No sense of achievement, no sense of accomplishment. Only a sense of looking forward to the next training.

Turns out at this distance, the finish mattered scarce, if at all. What mattered was all the training, the running 50miles, knowing folks are donating because I am doing this -- the age old adage "the end matters not, the means very much" coming true to each of its words.

As I look forward to more races and longer distances, I can only think of Thoreau -- "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."