aspirations

I recently had a birthday...my 27th birthday to be exact. Time to grow up, right? I'm not convinced of that yet so we'll save that for another day. What's been on my mind more so is that I turn 30 in three years. I don't have any apprehensions with turning the dreaded 3-0, like many twentysomethings do. What reverberates in my mind is the associated physical peak that comes with this age. Most that know me well, know that I love competing. Upon college graduation and hanging up my track spikes, I've turned to triathlons to fill that void. I competed for a few years and did well, but had to take the last few years off due to nagging knee injuries. I recently took training up again and have started the ascent of the slow, painful climb to physical strength and endurance. No pun intended, especially given that I just rode the daunting hills out at Shawnee Mission park. My comeback tour actually begins there only a little more than a month away. I have also delved into the training necessary to be able to compete in an Ironman triathlon. For those that might not know, an Ironman consists of a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, and a marathon, or 26.2 mile run. It takes an incredible amount of training to accomplish such a feat and I plan to do so by the time I'm 30.

I was in Wichita a few weekends ago to help my cousin celebrate his marriage. The next day I spent some time at another cousin's home. This cousin's wife, a mother of 4 children, recently ran her first marathon. It was the coveted Nike women's marathon in San Francisco. She was so proud of this feat that she created a picture book to tell her story. In this book, she wrote about how she had never run a mile in her life. For her own reasons of motivation, she trained and successfully ran an entire marathon. If she can accomplish this, I can finish an Ironman...if only my knees hold up.

There are countless miles and hours of training between then and now, but I know it'll be worth it. I can't imagine the feeling of crossing the finish line. It might take me 14+ hours, but I'm going to cross that finish line. And that feeling, when my entire body aches and burns, when exhaustion has completely overwhelmed me, is going to trump all the other feelings of accomplishment that I hold dear to me. That's the image that I've engraved into my mind for when I want to quit and am asking myself, "Why in the hell am I doing this?" More to come, but summer of 2009 will be the projected finale of this comeback tour.