This year marks the second year that my family and I have run in the Labour Day 5K cancer awareness walk. This year it was myself and my wife and two of our three children, ages five and 10. All of us participated last year, and this is the first year that my youngest daughter in the race finish the race running at almost the entire distance. Last year after the race, I had a very positive experience while waiting during the award ceremony. We didn’t attend the event last year nor this year for any special reason, but last year I had a very vivid reminder of one of the important things in life. So this year our participation was almost a tradition. Sometimes if you have an important reminder of something, it sparks the need to repeat the events or the activity in hopes of at least renewing a refreshing that reminder, if not finding something new the second time around.
I would not say that anything in a life altering way happened this year. I don’t have one of those keen insights into myself or into other people other than the fact that I shouldn’t participate in long-distance runs when I haven’t been exercising regularly. This time around I had been jogging in a couple of months because I’ve been traveling too much, and failing to jog while I’m traveling across the country. I wasn’t terribly bad shape in my time wasn’t terribly bad either although it was nothing to brag about. But I definitely was not acclimatize to running during the humid morning and I felt that run for several days afterwards.
The thing is I now have to figure out if I will participate in next year. I didn’t impart for a good cause, and this year I have to admit that I came back because of the unique insights I had last year which was very important to me at the time and stuck with me all year long. Failing to repeat that insight, I suppose I’m now confronted with the actual insides of introspection into myself and what exactly I was looking for in the event this year. Not say that I have to find something in every event or activity that participate in, but I felt like I expected to learn something once again just like I did last year.
Since I walked away from the event not having found anything in particular, it’s now making me ask the question “what was I looking for?”
I don’t have the answer to that, but I have the suspicion that if I could answer that question I might also find the answer. 🙂
well anyway, enough with the philosophy tonight I just needed to Up that story been meaning to mention it and failing to have a really good story like I did last year, I probably need to get to bed and get some sleep. Ironically, I’m in Atlanta this weekend after having to have taken a quick trip to her house here. Our alarm system was suffering from a bad sensor that was triggering the fire alarm over and over, and so I’m sleeping in an empty house waiting for two days for the repair man to show up and replace the sensor. While I’m here, and there may be some irony in this, I’m sleeping on a pillow that is covered with a T-shirt that I received during that run. You see our house here is mostly empty and all I have is a futon mattress and a couple of pillows. Unfortunately the pillows have no pillowcases as we washed and packed those when we moved and so when I got here I needed to make do and find something to use as a pillow case and ended up using the free T-shirt I received for participating in the run.
I’m pretty sure that I was not looking for a T-shirt when I went to that event, as I have a drawer full full of company logo shirts from one tradeshow after another, and no matter how much exercise there’s no way that I can use them all. We donate them by the boxes each year but I still tend to accumulate T-shirts far too quickly, and I’m enough of a packrat that I can’t seem to turn them down or get rid of them fast enough.