2009 12 31 looking back

Susan Donnelly Ultramarathon Trail Runner. Motivational Speaker. http://www.susanruns100s.com

Looking Back Date : December 31, 2009

Let me start by saying I am physically incapable of keeping a running log but am genetically predisposed to making lists. One of my favorite mementos of my grandmother is a list she made of songs (to buy? to remember? or satisfy the need to make a list?). I remember lists appearing here and there in her house, though not close to the extent that they now appear in my own.

Given this list-making tendency, I did what comes naturally when I finally got fed up with having to delay the immediate gratification of completing a race entry just to track down the answer to the inevitable and always different qualification/experience question (“what is your best 100-mile time?” “how many ultras have you run?” “have you completed a 50-miler in under 14 hours in the past two years?”). Yes, I made a list.

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Which quickly turned into a spreadsheet. And of course the engineer side of me couldn’t resist a chart or two. My pick-me-up on Mondays is to add the weekend’s race to the spreadsheet and watch all the totals and graphs tick upward. You can see why I’ve resisted admitting to this until now. It’s a little nerdy.

But here’s the thing. I looked at the list last week to enter a race and realized there aren’t any more post-race Mondays left in the year. The spreadsheet is frozen for the moment at the summit of 2009, and looking back surprises me. While you’re signing up and running races at the pace I have, you don’t really notice how it’s adding up, you just know that it is. Like an automatic savings account, you know that money goes in every month, but until you look at the end-of-year statement and compare it to last year’s, you don’t appreciate how far you’ve come.

I mean, twenty-two ultras, nine of them 100-milers, two sets of the 100s back-to-back, two of them overseas. How’d that happen???

And looking back even further is amazing. The first year when I didn’t know what I was doing but felt pulled by something beyond me to try it. The second year when I took a crazy blind leap of faith and ran my first 100 (loved it). The next several years when I gave in to doubt and other’s expectations and believed I “couldn’t, shouldn’t” run more than a handful of ultras a year. The horrible year I’m thankful just to have survived but that ultimately helped me break free of that doubt and re-build my life in a more satisfying way. The years since that one that have been spent developing the sadly atrophied muscle that gives you the strength to try new stuff and think Big. The spreadsheet tells a dramatic story of loss and gain, sadness and joy, fear and trust but if the heroine has come this far, think how much farther she can go!

So before you head pell-mell down the road to achieve all those 2010 goals, take a moment to list out and appreciate how much you did in 2009…heck, in the last decade. Pretty amazing, huh?

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