On Pushing the Limit


I went on a run yesterday; the kind where it's muggy and hot outside and you think about huge things while you lose your breath and sweat quickly covers your body. I told myself to run twenty minutes, and I started fast, and then thirty minutes passed, and I told myself to run some more.

It was hot and the sky looked like thunder and my legs felt like bricks and I just kept going. I didn't start out with grand thoughts about life, because I started out with basic thoughts about running, but the former evolved from the latter because that tends to be the way it works when you're running.

I started going to CrossFit last summer and I continued for about two months. During that time, I stopped running because most of the time I was too sore to run, and when I wasn't too sore to run I felt too strong to need to run. It was fine, and then I stopped going to CrossFit, but I kind of had already stopped running, so for a while I was just sort of lazy. When I finally started again, I never pushed myself to the caliber that I used to in my cross-country days, and certainly not to failure like I often did in CrossFit.

I got so comfortable that I forgot what the edges of my comfort zone felt like. But I like being in that space. I need it.

Here's to finding that line, and then walking on it.