Back to the Beginning
Originally posted June 27, 2018
June 26, 2018 – three months to the day that my beloved husband, Chad, left this world, and exactly 12 weeks since our third child, Levi, entered it. The two timelines collided, and it felt like a good place to start something new or start something over – a journey back to old things in hopes of creating new things. So I went back to the place that has seemed to be there at the beginning of so many new seasons of my life – the track.
I grew up playing competitive softball, and while that was great for developing so many other skills, one thing it did not develop in me was an ability to run long distances. I pitched and was never a home-run hitter, so rarely did I sprint much farther than first base – a mere 90 feet. I’m not sure I’d ever ran farther than 100 meters until the spring of my freshman year of college.
My long-time boyfriend and I officially ended things, and I was particularly annoyed with the dreaded freshman 15 that I had gained, being that I was newly single again.
(Side Note: The culprit wasn’t booze, but biscuits and gravy 3 days a week in the student union after my 8:30 am Calculus class! Who even takes an 8:30 am math class in college??? I obviously needed the biscuits and gravy to survive 8:30 am Calculus.)
Anyhow, there I was, 19 and busting out of my size 4 “fat pants” (insert eyeroll). I wish I could tell my 19 year old self to get a real problem.. because I’m 32 now and we got real weight problems! Ha!
So I decided to try running… more like jogging, which is way more accurate because saying “I run” is really a disservice to people who do run, but it just sounds cooler. So running it is…
“Running” is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do. I’ve always been moderately athletic, well-coordinated, and not intimidated by sports, but this… this was brutal. It took me months of going to the track 3-4 days a week before I could run 3 miles without stopping. But never having done anything like that before, 3 miles felt like a massive accomplishment. That was probably the first inkling I had of understanding that we are capable of so much more than we think we are – something Chad used to tell me all the time.
I wish I would have stuck with my newfound hobby, but just about the time I really started to like the way running was reshaping my body and mind, I began another relationship… and started eating out way too much and slowly sinking back into that all-too-familiar comfort zone of complacency.
Fast forward 4 more years and we broke up too. So there I was, 23 this time, and heading back to the track. I needed to clear my head, and nothing does that for me like running. Because I literally can’t think about anything other than not dying while I’m sweating to death in the Oklahoma heat. Every step feels like a struggle. But the struggle forces me to focus on the moment instead of worrying about my life. It’s like torture and therapy at the same time. This time I stuck with running for quite a few years. I did a handful of 5k races with some friends, and really wanted to do a half-marathon, but never found the will to push myself that hard.
In the winter of 2012, my then-just-friend Chad, decided he wanted to run the OK Memorial Marathon that April, so we started running together a lot of nights in the evening. He’d never ran before January of that year, and he didn’t have much time, so he was training hard for April. He’d run his laps, I’d run my one or two and then we’d walk and talk. Talk about God, about life, about love (but not with each other because we literally had no interest at all in each other at this point).
It was on these running adventures with Chad that a lot of things changed for me. I learned a lot more about myself than I knew before. I realized even more that determination trumps ability, and Chad had such a gentle way of pushing me to exceed my expectations of myself. When I thought I was ready to quit, he’d tell me “you can’t quit now; you’re only at 40%; you’ve got so much left to give” or “there is no such thing as can’t; there is only will or won’t” or “your body doesn’t tell your mind what to do; your mind tells your body what to do.”
Sometimes when I really thought I had hit my max, he’d get in front of me and run backwards and say, “This is the best mile of your life; don’t stop now,” with this funny grin on his face, because he knew if I could have caught him in that moment, I might have choked him. But it always worked. It was on one of those runs with Chad that I broke a 10-minute mile for the first time, which to all you real runners, it probably sounds hilarious to celebrate such running mediocrity, but to me that was a huge accomplishment, because like the T-shirt says, “I’m slower than a herd of turtles stampeding through peanut butter.” True story.
I fell in love with Chad while we were running. We’d been friends for a year and a half, but I saw a side of him I’d never seen before over those months – a side that cared about helping me reach my goals for no other reason than just to see me proud of myself. I saw his determination in action as he went from a non-runner in January to someone running consistent 7-minute miles by the end of April. I learned a lot more about his faith and his past hurts and his dreams for the future as we talked during our cooldown walks. I realized that the man I thought was so wrong for me, was really the person I’d been searching for all along.
He told me he loved for the first time at the track. It was later in the summer after I’d confessed my undying love to him in dramatic fashion weeks earlier. We were walking and talking about life and he just suddenly stopped, turned to face me, grabbed both my hands and said, “I think I love you, and it scares the hell out of me.”
Seven months later, we were married.
But much like the first years of marriage often require, we lost pieces of ourselves in trying to figure out who we were together. Love seemed so much easier before we were married. The first year was so hard, mostly because I didn’t realize just how resistant to change I was until Chad moved into my house and wanted to change everything. I spent the first 4 months we were married trying to decide if marrying my best friend was a horrible mistake. And then just about the time I decided this might work, I found out I was pregnant with Samuel, which was just more change I wasn’t ready for at that moment. Samuel was 5 months old when I found out I was pregnant with Lilly. Lilly was 9 months old when I got pregnant again, which ended in miscarriage. A year later, I was pregnant for the 4th time in a little over 4 years, with Levi being born 2 months after our 5th anniversary. We celebrated our 1st, 2nd, and 5th wedding anniversaries while I was pregnant.
With all this being pregnant and recovering from being pregnant and raising children, our running adventures really fell to the wayside. It probably would have done wonders for my mental state if I could have found the wherewithal to keep doing it, but raising kids is exhausting, and energy is a precious commodity. Plus, I knew Chad loved me the way I was, even 50 lbs heavier than the day we got married. I didn’t love my body, but he did because it created life, and he loved my soul even more. He made me feel beautiful every day, so killing myself at the track didn’t seem like a huge priority.
But I’ve found myself in this awful place now where he’s gone, and there is no one here to make me feel beautiful when I look at myself in the mirror and feel disgusted. He wasn’t here in the aftermath of Levi’s birth, when my belly looked like a deflated balloon, to give me his speech about how amazing my body was for growing a human and how that was way cooler than having abs even if it meant softer curves and less toned skin. He hasn’t been here for the last few months of sleepless nights and unwashed hair and 2-day-old clothes and bags under my eyes to make me believe that I’m totally rocking this mom thing. He isn’t here to bandage my broken soul. He just isn’t here. It’s just me, lost in my thoughts, losing myself in my mind a lot of days.
So I went to the track today; in search of something old buried within me, in hopes that it might birth something new.
Determination; perseverance; love; faith; hope. Hope that if I keep going, one day I’ll look up and life won’t be so hard or lonely anymore. Faith that God is going to bring something beautiful out of my devastation. Love for myself and my life. Perseverance and determination to not just survive but to thrive.I ran pitifully, but I ran. My feet were hurting from all the extra weight. My lungs gave in to huffing and puffing too quickly. My legs were on fire after just a short distance, but I kept my eyes on the road and just kept going, because all I could hear was his voice in my head saying, “You can’t quit now, Baby. You’re only at 40%. You’ve got so much left to give.”
Blessings,
Shannon
