A celebration of being a bit shit at something and doing it in anyways

I've been running for 15 years. It’s been an on and off thing for me. Months, years have gone by where I haven’t hit the pavement, but it always beckons me back.

There’s an intrinsic call, desire, pull, goal, knawing knowing that compels me to keep at it, despite the fact that I don’t hit any impressive metrics when it comes to distance or speed and that I’m mostly shuffling along with generous breaks.

And you might say, who cares? It’s about the taking part, the benefits of being outdoors and the improvement in cardiovascular health. And I agree with you, that’s the purpose of this post of course.

But you are discounting my inner perfectionist, that mean critical nagging comparative bully, forged in my youth, when I was the gifted academic kid; when learning and concepts came more easily to me than most of my peers, and it set me up for the impossible expectation of being one of the best at everything I do with little effort.

So doing a practice ‘badly’ and committing to it over the years, requires reserves of self love and mastery at disarming that internal critic. 

Not an easy feat, but one that’s so worthwhile as it means that I get out in nature, move my body and feel that sense of aliveness when my feet propel me forward on the road.