Day 286 of 365: The Lost Days of Oafishness

I'm apparently too stubborn for my own good. I went on a light jog that didn't outright suck, so I'm not ready to put myself out of the running just yet when it comes to, well, running. I also went on the half-marathon's website and saw where I would be running, which made me just that more pumped to run.


All this hullabaloo over my injuries and getting old made me think about all those aforementioned things that I had quit long ago: ballet in elementary school, track before I hit my junior year of high school. I think about how I spent years, my entire adolescence and then some, describing myself as "oafish" and "that tall, gangly one", much to the disarmingly ready agreement of my then-friends. I think about those years as an "oaf". I think about what changed between then and now and I realize that it's not just because I got more athletic, or because I started training more. It was because I got some self-esteem.


One of the nicest things about growing into my late twenties is that I've grown to have an appreciation for who I am and what I can do. I don't compare constantly the way I would as a teenager. I'm not measuring the width of my torso and weeping to myself because my torso is way wider than, say, Christina Aguilera's (which is humorous, given how today she's so voluptuous).


I spent a lot of my life assuming I was too awkward for my own good. In a cruel, ironic twist, because I felt so oafish, I never signed up for anything that required any athletic skill, because I assumed I would miss the mark, not realizing that I had so much athletic potential just waiting to be tapped into. And maybe -- just maybe -- if I had stuck it out with dance, or track, or had some type of mentor who would see past all the "oafish" statements and tell me to cut the self-pitying crap, maybe I would've stopped seeing myself in such a light at an earlier age.


So now it's my turn to tell myself to cut it with the self-pitying crap, to deal with injuries as they occur and not obsess over them, and to keep on keeping on. Yes, it's easy to see the benefits of dropping from this race: I can attend a UFC event with my friends, I can have the weekend to myself, I don't have to wake up at butt o'clock to make my way to Boston. But, like I talked about yesterday, there's a 37-year-old future me who is ready to shake me for bemoaning over my "old" state, the same way I want to shake my 17-year-old self for bemoaning over her "oafish" state.