FINALLY.
The day is here. I'm excited and nervous, but most of all, ready for it to be over.
Hopefully, when I wake up this evening, the hideous pressure that has been attacking my body will be gone. Just one year ago i was contemplating running the Thanksgiving Day half-marathon. Today? I contemplate being able to simply walk once again without great difficulty. What a year can do to ya, huh?
In a way however, it's the end of another, very old, struggle of mine.
In sports I have always been the fastest, strongest, you name it, of any one on the field. The first chosen in pickup games. The star of the team. At the same time, I have been from an early age, very bookish and studious and a lover of the arts. I read newspapers front to back at age seven. I conversed with adults about the events of the day and loved poetry and abstract thought.
That all seems lovely, but when you are a teenager, these varied interests often collide. You can't be all things to all people, you must choose. Did I hang out with my jock buddies from the football team? What about the artsy/intelligensia types on the smoking block whose chats fed my brain?
These worlds tended to collide. I chose the path to what had become an even more over-riding interest. Yep, girls. Hot girls usually went for the football player, not the member of the Honor society.
I did find another path to my main interest a bit later when I formed a band. In that way I was able to be a bit more artsy-fartsy and feed that side of me.
Ahhh, but how time marches on. School gives way to career and cars and houses and dogs and cats and goldfish and you don't date any longer, you have *gulp* "relationships" that last longer than a month. Girls aren't girls anymore, they're women.
Through it all though the Jock never dies. I play tennis, softball, pick-up football, paintball games, run 10k's or whatever I can find because I am still after all this time the fastest, quickest and often, the winner. Always, always, this part of me must constantly be reaffirmed.
Time itself crashes this party and steps in and says "enough is enough dumbass". I'll never be the fastest or quickest again. In fact, it is not advisable that I ever run again. I can likely play golf and I can hike and walk and work in my yard back to normal levels, but never, ever again will I cross a finish line and win. For the first time since I was a small child, my arms and legs cannot carry me to the cheers and respect of others.
Therefore, Time has decided this battle once and for all. "Get back inside your head, dumbass" (Time annoying calls me "dumbass" quite a bit). It's okay, I've never lost track of that child mesmerized by "Leaves of Grass". He has been patient and tolerant of that insufferable Jock all this time. He always knew, that in the end, it was he would be declared the winner.
And so at 3pm today, his victory is announced. Long may he reign.
But he'll always still love the kid who used to yell "Race you to the corner!".
I'll be back.

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