"Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better." ---Samuel Beckett

     I'm still injured and poorly prepared, but I paid my entry fee so will give the "Livestrong Half Marathon" a go, even if I end up walking it all.  The worst that can happen is that I will time out and they will escort me off of the course.  At least I will have tried.  Keep your fingers crossed for me.  Next time I will do better, after taking some serious time off to heal.









     Here is a well written entry from Kristen Armstrong's "Mile Markers" blog.  Perspective is everything.

luxury

Pain can be a luxury, not a punishment.

By

Kristin Armstrong;

Image by

Gregg Segal

Published

February 14, 2013

My friend’s son’s funeral was last week, and several of his friends got up and spoke at the service. One of them said something I will never forget:

Pain is a luxury.

I have thought a lot of about pain before - that it’s horrible, or gut wrenching, or necessary for the harvest of growth, maturity, or endurance. I even love the quote, “Pain is weakness leaving your body.” I have thought about pain as something to get through, break through, and get over with. I have never in 41 years truly considered it a luxury. Until last week.

The young man stood up at the podium on the altar, with his collegiate blue sport coat, tie, and curly dark hair that swooped forward into his eyes. He leaned on a crutch, from a recent motorcycle accident, and steadied himself at the microphone. He said that sentence, pain is a luxury, and he paused. I’m not sure if the pause was for emphasis, or an attempt to corral his emotions so he could proceed. Either way, it leveled me. Something about a 21-year-old boy, trying to grapple with something so big and so hard, and in the same moment being able to fast forward and picture my own son, teetering on the precipice of manhood. All those emotions swirled and I looked off to the side instead of right at him as he spoke, knowing that if I looked for one more second I would break down. Instead I blinked and bit my lip.

Pain is a luxury. It’s a luxury, this young man described, to suffer the pain of heartbreak. Because, he said, it’s a luxury to love so deeply that you are able to hurt that bad. I wish I had known about this luxury concept years ago. Back in my sophomore year of high school when my boyfriend and I broke up (I did the breaking up and then the pining and wanting him back – after he started dating the prettiest senior in my entire school. Oh, the pain). Or when I said goodbye to my college boyfriend when life took us in different directions. Or at the end of my marriage when my heart was in splinters and shrapnel, and I bent in the dust to collect whatever I could salvage from the wreckage of our home. In those moments my pain felt more like a penalty than a luxury. But when that 21-year-old boy spoke, something yawned open in my heart and mind and I started to understand. Someone who has never loved or been loved, or wanted children and never had them, would likely suffer anything for the experience. That pain is indeed a luxury.

Childbirth, heartbreak, loss, letting go, empty nest, the physical pain of training or racing – all this pain is luxurious when you succumb to this mindset. Like pushing our bodies so hard that they later ache from the effort… people on the sidelines (ill, injured or unable), would probably love that luxury, at least once. That one sentence changed my thinking this week, infused my sense of gratitude, informed my beginning of Lent, gave my training fresh legs and renewed vigor, and cranked open my creaking, skittish heart to the new love in my life.

We cannot live without the luxury of pain. We cannot avoid it or live in the shadow created by fearing it. We cannot minimize our existence by numbing it, or marginalize our experience by living around it.

We must learn to welcome it, even embrace it, as a sure sign of a life well loved.

Happy Valentines Day.

http://www.runnersworld.com/runners-stories/luxury