Courage of Conviction

As regular readers will notice, I’ve been a courage kick lately - writing about it, doing light research on it, etc.  Today will be no different.  This post is about a different type of courage that I’ve experienced jsut recently.  At the end of July I went down to Baltimore with my neighbor for a 14-mile training run.  It was a hot day and I struggled through the second half of the run.  At one point I stepped on a rock and twisted my ankle.  It didn’t bother me immediately.  In fact I didn’t feel it until a week later on another long run.  That’s when my problems started.  Since then I have only been able to run about two miles before experiencing pain. 

I’m in the process of getting it taken care of, I’ve gone to my chiropractor and to my message therapist who have both been working to heal the injury.  It is progressing, but I’ve experienced a great deal of frustration with not being able to do something that I love for a few weeks now - run distance. 

All this leads me to the topic for today - practical courage.  I’ve learned that it takes alot of courage to be patient.  I must be patient if I am to have a full recovery.  I must be patient to wait to run again the way I want to run.  Patience, in this essense will get me through this time, by helping me remember the big picture.  The big picture isn’t the half marathon I’m scheduled to run in Sept that I probably won’t be able to run.  It isn’t the Baltimore marathon scheduled for Oct. 13th either - I’m not sure if I’ll be able to run that.  The big picture is being able to enjoy running distances again. 

It takes courage to be patient.  It takes courage to see past the short term and focus on the long term. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 9:44 pm and is filed under Courage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.