The past few nights I’ve come from my runs complaining that my chocolate milk (forget “energy drinks” or “replacement fuel”… Chocolate milk is where it’s at!) had frozen solid in my carry bottle before I was done running.
My roommate’s response, said in a tone similar to “You know you’re a Redneck when…,” was: You know it might be too cold to be outside when your milk freezes solid before you finish running!
I don’t disagree.
But suffering in the cold isn’t anything that tough people haven’t done before.
I’ve been mocked, sneered at, and called corny for what I’m about to tell you, but I’ll swear upon a stack of Bibles that it’s true, and I dare you to tell me that the chills I get up and down my spine aren’t real.
Whenever I’m running in the cold, when my fingers have gone numb and my face is chapped and burned from the wind, I think about the soldiers of the Continental Army who survived the winter of 1777 at Valley Forge. I’m serious. A countless number of those soldiers survived the winter without shoes. I can always make it another hour with cold fingers.
In that vein, whenever I think I’m growing weary and that the distance may be too much I think about the soldiers who experienced the Bataan Death March during World War II. In organized events, I will always know where the finish line is. Be it 24 hours, 100 miles – 135 miles, someday, hopefully! – I will always know exactly how many steps I have to take before I can collapse into a chair, get a massage, and gorge on calories. The soldiers at Bataan, they just had to keep moving. And, rest their weary souls, some of them never made it to the finish line. And so I run toward my finish lines for those who never made it to theirs.
A third source of motivation I have, whenever my feet grow sore from the pounding or with blisters and chafing, is to think about soldiers who are at the very same second patrolling in the mountains of Afghanistan. They don’t get to slow down or quit just because their feet hurt. Nor do I. And because I don’t quit now, in a controlled event, I gain confidence that I will have the intestinal fortitude to never quit on game day, when it really counts – in the middle of a real world, boots-on-the-ground mission.
Never quit. Never, never quit.
