You're Never Too Old to Finish A Race

This past Saturday I participated in the Homeboy Industries annual 5K. I participated last year, but I had some kind of injury—I cant remember what exactly because I’ve been injured pretty much every three months for the past 3 years—but I had to walk the entire thing. It ended up being lovely because I walked with a woman, Mary Ann, who has been married 50 years and told me all about how she had to reinvent herself when her kids moved out it was just her and her husband alone again. Mary Ann realized she had no idea who she was anymore. She traveled internationally alone. She started doing Christian meditation, a practice I’ve come to deeply love where you just sit and listen to your “God” intuition. She volunteers. Mary Ann is the kind of tender soul I can only hope to become when I’m in my 60’s and 70’s. But I digress…

This year was different—this year, I ran. Not just part of the race, the entire race and not only that, I finished the race. This might not be a big deal to some of you distance runners and athletes – but I’m a sprinter. I am excellent at giving it 1000% in a small burst and crashing afterwards. As I ran through downtown LA on that perfect morning, I got to thinking about my complicated relationship to sports. During my track and field days, I perpetually had shin splints, so following every practice or meet, I recovered in the ice bath. (I hated the ice, but loved the fact that it was co-ed.) I was great at soccer and probably could have been truly great but I was also a scrapper who was perpetually injured. I played ice hockey, but my family would come to the games just to laugh at me get my ass handed to me. 

As some of you know, I moved a lot—by the time I was in 9th grade I had been to 7 schools. So I would get started on a team or a sport and then we would move. I was a straight-A student so I wanted to be that star tennis/soccer/track star and had the ability, but never really had the stability to create that reality. In my teen years that instability translated to lack of discipline and if I’m to get painfully honest with myself, I think all those years of being injured was a way of letting myself off the hook for being a mediocre athlete instead of a great one. 

There’s that idiom: “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” Running on Saturday I realized, I've let perfect be the enemy of so much. It’s why I dropped out of college when, instead of living up to my expectation of going to an Ivy League school, I had to settle for a Liberal Arts college. It’s why I want to give up on comedy because I started so late. It’s why I have a hard time finishing my book proposal, because I’m petrified of finishing the book. 

The brain does weird things to you when you’re exerting yourself, primarily telling you to stop even when you don’t actually need to stop. Half of my run was enjoyable; I was in the moment, in my body and it felt good to be healthy and out with 2800 Angelenos doing something for our community. About a quarter was my run was spent fighting Brain's urge to stop running. “You can’t finish this race, Bridget. You’ve never finished anything, let alone a race.” Even if Brain was lying, a part of me, the part of me that was disappointed in myself for not living up to my potential as a teenager, believes those lies. 

But I pushed through. I kept repeating: Don’t stop running, just finish. It wasn’t like I had trained for this, although I have been running a lot. I didn’t really even intend to run the whole thing but once I got started, I figured, “Why not? I might as well try to finish since I’ve never done anything like this before.” 

The last quarter of the race was brutal. I wanted to puke. I wanted to quit. It was hot and Brain seemed to actively be working against me at that point. “You’ve done enough. It’s great you made it up that hill! You don’t need to run the entire thing.” 

Don’t stop running, just finish. Focus on your breath. Don’t stop running, just finish. Focus on the next step. Don’t stop running, just finish. Don’t stop running, just finish.  

As I approached the finish line, the church clock struck 9am. Holy shit, not only did I finish the race, but I was running 10-minute miles! (9:48 to be exact). 

Maybe it was the nausea I was fighting, but in that moment of crossing the finish line I felt like crying and what was that new emotion? Was it pride? I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been proud of myself in my life, always disappointed. But it felt like pride. At 38-years-old I had finally finished a damn race. And it felt good. 

Actually, it felt perfect.