If Not Now, When?

This sort of ties in with yes­ter­day evening’s post. I’ve decid­ed to knock off a few things on my life-to-do-list. So, I’ve signed up to run the Rich­mond Marathon this Novem­ber. Angela is going to do it as well, so we can encour­age one anoth­er. I believe this has almost noth­ing to do about whether my body can han­dle the run­ning of 26.2 miles (although my left knee scares the shit out of me). It is going to be about com­mit­ting to doing some­thing that I’ve want­ed to do all my life. When I was a kid, I thought I would some­day want to run the Boston Marathon. Well, come to find out, they don’t let just any jok­er like me sign up for that (some­thing about qual­i­fy­ing). So, I’ll be okay just run­ning a marathon, rather than what many con­sid­er to be the marathon. None-the-less, if I were to just wait to do this until I was absolute­ly sure that I was capa­ble of tak­ing the time and effort to fin­ish, then I’d like­ly nev­er do it. I’m tak­ing a chance on myself, and this is some­thing I have real­ly want­ed to do for a long time, now.

I sup­pose Ange­la’s rea­sons are sim­i­lar, although it’s not real­ly been some­thing she’s talked about doing so much. I think she wants the chal­lenge as well. To do some­thing that most fam­i­ly and friends would think she’s not capa­ble of doing. Again, this isn’t about com­pet­ing with any­one, but our­selves. And that means one thing: run­ning (or walk­ing, for that mat­ter) across the fin­ish line.

Anoth­er thing is, Angela and I are both the kind of peo­ple who know peo­ple who have run marathons. How­ev­er, we both don’t want that to be our expe­ri­ence: to be the friend of the peo­ple who do things. That’s no real way to know life. We’re going to have to do things like this for our­selves. Have an expe­ri­ence, not just some sto­ries we’re heard.

For the record, I esti­mat­ed my fin­ish­ing time at 4 hours and 15 min­utes. Is that being opti­mistic? Prob­a­bly, but so isn’t the very idea of me fin­ish­ing a marathon?

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

2 comments

  1. A marathon…I wish you the best of luck, and I don’t mind hav­ing oth­er peo­ple run marathons while I lis­ten to the sto­ries. It is impres­sive how­ev­er. I almost got to go on a busi­ness trip to Rich­mond ear­li­er, but the deal fell through. 

  2. Hey, Zane! Thanks for com­ing by. Yeah, we’ll both be need­ing all the luck we can get. How­ev­er, the process we are going through is a very long one to get there. The marathon isn’t for six months. We’re using the approach that in order to climb a moun­tain, you have to put one foot in front of the other.

    If you’re ever in Rich­mond (or near­by), please drop in. You’re always welcome.

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