Shoes

There are a few decisions that I made in Highschool that I'm proud of. One of them was running cross country.
You hear sports analogies a lot. High profile coaches from all sorts of sports teams in all sorts of leagues routinely take the "motivational speaker" track. People can relate to sports, and sports can relate to life. But Running is different.
Most sports require a combination of Teamwork, Athletic Ability, and Strategy. We like this because it makes us feel good that we can apply a similar formula to things like the workplace, or family life, or whatnot. But distance running has nothing to do with teamwork. It has very little strategy. Success in running is being both the most athletic person, and the person most able to push himself far beyond the point of giving/throwing up.

Does this lend itself to good motivational speaking?
It should. Unlike just about every other sport, running is not learned or taught. There is no official rulebook. There is just your feet. It is a part of us. Everyone is a runner. We are born with it. Something so fundamental to our bodies ought to have many things to teach us about ourselves.

I got new shoes this weekend. In highschool I started wearing "last season's" shoes as my everyday beaters, and its a habit that I continue. Modern running trainers are one of the most noticeable types of shoes. They are all made out of mesh, they are usually reflective, and they always have an enormous heel cushion. They are built for utility. That heel cushion is designed to absorb impact and help reduce injury from the constant pounding that running puts on your body. They are great.
They are also lousy to run races with.

In fact, a great deal of runners run races with "flats", if not spikes. Flats are still mesh and reflective, but instead of a heel cushion they have a thin piece of rubber under your foot. They can hurt your feet. They can damage your body. But they make you run faster, because they are light and don't absorb energy that you should be using to run with.

During cross country season in highschool, race days were pretty much the best day of the week. On a training day, you would spend 2 hours running as much as you can, constantly wondering why you were putting yourself through so much misery. You would try to eat healthily, since you wanted to be in shape for races. In fact, large lunches made practice super-ultra miserable, so you learned to only eat just enough to not be hungry.

But on a race day, you could eat more lunch because races were later in the day. We got to ride on a bus for an hour or three and relax, do nothing, and enjoy our afternoon. Then you would race for 20 minutes, whereby you put everything out of your mind and do what you trained to do. Then you eat as many cookies as you could possibly hold in your stomach, drink as much vitamin water as you had fit in your bag, and enjoy the ride home.

Race Day is a party.
Except race day is absolutely meaningless if you never put the effort into training.
On Race Day, how good your feet and knees feel is not a concern because running fast is the only concern.
But training is grueling, and precautions have to be taken to ensure that training doesn't interfere with racing.
On Race Day, you need to replenish the hundreds of Calories you burn during a race.
But during training, you need to eat a balanced diet.

Everything in life has a preparation stage and an action stage. You prepare for your career by training in school. If you don't work hard in school, you might not have what it takes to be the top of your field. You prepare for your marriage by maintaining good character and living with purpose, not by listening to Avril Lavigne lyrics. By all accounts, training days are more difficult than race days. But when it comes down to it, the race is the only thing that matters.