On November 13, 2023, at 4:05 pm, I started running toward pain. This highly subjective emotion successfully held me, prisoner, for years, but it took it up a notch by adding an extra lock on the door after the death of my beloved father. I had no choice but to start running toward pain six months after his death. At that point, physical pain relieved me from my uncontrolled and riotous emotional pain.
I’ve been around my father my entire forty-six-year life. Living the rest of my life “fatherless” felt like serving a cruel life sentence that added more years with every passing second. This moving marble inside my heart needed to find its resting place. The movement from running seemed to do the ironic trick. When things hurt, the last thing we want to do is move or have someone else touch the injury. I felt relief by moving my bleeding heart.
Through physical pain, my body was ordered to find and destroy my biggest enemy, who brought other friends as reinforcements, commonly known as loss of appetite, fatigue, loss of interest, and the most incredible and horrible feeling of sadness. The type of sadness that can only live in the deep end of the deepest part of my heart.
Running changed my life. My body refused to take orders and put me on the front lines to fight my emotional pain. It told me that it had nothing to do with it, and it was my fight to fight. Our bodies are pretty intelligent; they will never give us a task we cannot handle. My body was eager to start coaching me through the process with two simple phrases of encouragement: be careful and lose the fear.
My body’s words of encouragement sound like a coaching style like my father’s. His encouraging manner was brief and on point as a man of a few words. He would laugh at my attempt to run, as I have never been athletic and always trip even on the flattest surfaces.
The Boulderthon is September 29, 2024, in Boulder, CO. I will do the physical work; my father’s job is to ride along carefully tucked and protected inside my heart.
The two of us will be ready.
