Reasons to Run: Fight the temptation of looking at greener grass by running

I’ve been feeling a little too old in comparison with the girls on my team recently, further proven by my attendance at a get-together with a few old teammates, none of whom my current teammates know.

Though I’d been on the team with all of the girls at the party, I was the only one of the bunch still competing for BYU. I was also one of the few without a child. Or two children. Or pregnant with a second. Though it had been a long time since I’d seen the girls, we picked up as if we’d gone on a run together that morning. We exchanged stories while laughing about their kids’ latest antics or the current track team’s successful races.

I got to hold and play with everyone’s babies, the offspring of tiny runner girls who, even after bearing children, still look like they could bust a sub-five-minute mile.

Carter cried when Benson took his basketball. Race played with toy cars. Adylee sucked on the beads of my necklace; Lily let me hold her and stared at me with big blue eyes. Mia came straight to me and wanted me to show her the cat.

I watched as the girls with whom I once shared the track now lovingly mother their children, girls whose worlds used to revolve around hard workouts and high miles and spikes and pre-race bananas, the way mine still does.

So there is life after running. Life where it’s OK if you skip a day or two of working out. Where the pressure of qualifying times and places doesn’t haunt your dreams. Instead, there are little hands, little feet, little faces and little voices.

Sometimes I suffer from “the grass is greener on the other side” disease. I think it can also be classified with “always something better coming around the corner” flu. Sometimes I am so focused on wishing I was farther ahead in my life that I forget to live what’s staring me in the face. That's not to say that it is bad to be goal-oriented, but when my sight is set so far ahead, I become dissatisfied with the road I’m currently on. I romanticize about what I’ll be doing in six months, a year or even five years, just as I did six months, one year, and five years ago about where I am now. How easily I forget.

From my own experience, it has taken injury to remind me how much I love running, and losing to remind me how much I love winning. It's a sort of “never know what you’ve got 'til it’s gone” allergy, a constant itch to get back to what was once yours.