NOW THAT WAS DUMB!

BY JACK GRAY

Talking about being dumb is a little like talking about my relatives. Some of them are very nice folds. You would enjoy being around them. Then others of them are about as odd as a three dollar bill. But I never forget that they are MY relatives. I can talk about them, but I don’t want to hear it from you. I just expect you to be quiet; and accept them as they are. Think your private thoughts; but lay off criticizing my relatives around me.

Even so, we all do some pretty dumb things in our running. We usually know it right when it happens; but we are pretty touchy if someone else points it out. Do you remember, for example, when you hurt yourself doing something that you knew better than to do in the first place? Maybe it put you out of running for weeks as you struggled to recover. That was bad enough, but do you remember that three months later you did the same dumb thing all over again? Earlier you had thought that after the first experience you would NEVER so a similar thing again; but now you are hurt in the same place and for the same reason. Doesn’t that make you feel smart?

Let your mind flow backwards over races you probably should not have run or training sessions you should have avoided. I remember one of the Midnight Runs where there was so much ice on the roads that it was almost a miracle just to stand up. I remember a race in Overton Park where not only was the footing terrible but sleet was blowing almost horizontal, so that it would actually sting your face as you ran. I remember being challenged to so a training run when it was raining so hard we could hardly see; and in some places water was over our shoe tops. I was even with a dear friend two miles down the River Trail when the sirens went off from the storm that destroyed so much downtown. (We kidded one another later about how we set a PR getting back that night!) No doubt you could add volumes to these war stories; because, for most of us they are part of our common experiences in running. We probably can remember times when we have run where if they had been giving free IQ tests, we could not have qualified for Kindergarten! Yet there are reasons that we did it; and we would do it all over again if we had the chance.

1.IT IS THE STUFF OF GOOD MEMORIES. Can you believe one runner told me recently that the run in the sleet was the best race he had ever done? Even though only about 35 even showed up and we were bundled up like Eskimos, so that good running was an utter impossibility. Then do you suppose I will EVER know where I was or who I was with the night of the big storm? Just think back on the most thrilling, exciting times you have experienced in running, and see if they don’t involve times and circumstances where some of your friends would question the wisdom of your being involved at all.

2.THEY ARE LEARNING EXPERIENCES. The lessons are sometimes painful to be sure, but they also leave impressions that shape our lives. The very fact that we realize we should have known better helps us to be more careful in the future. There was a time when I had to hard falls at exactly the same spot on a dark street within only weeks of one another. A friend mentioned that other runners always crossed on the other side of the road before coming to the dark area. Don’t you know I wondered why I hadn’t figures that out for myself? But it also reminded me how often I have said to myself, after repeating one of my mistakes, “Now that wasn’t very smart!” Sometimes the more painful the lesson, the longer we remember.

The truth of the matter is that we all know better than we do. We get ourselves in trouble with our eyes wide open. We injure ourselves by violating the rules we already understand. We just forget to take our “smart pills”; and do things we know are not all that smart. Then we feel even worse, because we know that basically our poor running, and even our injuries are mostly our own fault. Yet this is also the process by which we become better.

There are many things that are almost imperative to good running. Aren’t you glad that real intelligence is not one of them? You can so some of the dumbest things and still run well. You can make blunders and mistakes; but still improve. Much of it is just accepting responsibility for your past mistakes; and resolving to do better. Your mistakes also make you very human. You are just like the rest of us, so come on, Dummy, let’s go run.