Time

I ran my first marathon over 10 years ago when I was but a young lieutenant in the Army. I don’t exactly recall why I made the decision to abuse my body for the 4 months leading up to the event and the race itself. It may have been the pressure exerted on me by my commander at the time who was a hard core runner himself, all 5 feet of him. It may have been a way for me to get in better shape. It could also be that I was repressing a little bit of self masochism and needed a constructive outlet. Regardless of the motivation, I spent many an early morning dodging road kill and pounding the pavement of Fort Hood preparing my body to endure the 26 miles and 385 yards I pledged to conquer.

I wasn’t the only sucker that the commander got to run. He drafted other unsuspecting officers to join in the misery and even pressured some NCO’s to participate. Our final group was small and the daily training runs started early so we could start the day with the rest of the unit. We usually ran together for the first few miles, but as the blood started pumping and we shook the blankets of sleep from our muscles, we thinned out as we settled into our own individual paces. Not as fast as most of the folks, I spent a lot of time running alone. It frustrated me. I ran track for 6 years before college, but rarely had to run more than a 5k. Back then, all my runs were over in less than half an hour, yet there I was trying to cover the scheduled 10 miles without thinking about how long the run would take. How long had I been running for? How long until the next water stop? When does the sun come up? I viewed time as my enemy, but not in the same sense that professional athletes interpret it. I was not trying to beat the clock or achieve a personal record. Instead, time was part of this intricate plot to make the agony of the run last for as long as possible and I loathed it for that reason. Now I’m an educated person and I know about the theory of relativity. That didn’t mean I appreciated how sluggish my watch moved when I wanted nothing more than to stop all this running business.

This was by no means my first run in with the troublesome clock. On long trips across country, time between rest stops was long and painful, especially when your dad only stopped when he needed to fuel up and you just got done gulping down half a pitcher of Kool-Aid. “Oh Yeaaaaah” quickly turned into “Oh Nooooo!” combined with a modified sitting position of the pee-pee dance. Every Christmas Eve lasted forever and the acceptable hour to wake up the parents (required before tearing into the gifts) mocked me from afar. The 4 years of college were brutal and the hands on the clock moved as if they were double tasked with telling time and pulling farm equipment. The days spent in Iraq were longer than normal and time moved at glacial speed keeping home so far away. In retrospect, time has never been a good friend of mine. In fact, it’s not even cordial or polite. It just there, unknowingly torturing the souls that are bound to it and leaving us wondering why it moves so damn slow, or too fast. That’s right. Time is a fickle fiend. Not only will it prolong your pain, it has no qualms with prematurely stealing your joy. Recess is never long enough, weekends and vacations too short, and I swear that alarm clocks were invented by Beelzebub himself to rob you of those extra few minutes of deep and cozy sleep (which is why the snooze button is consider by some as a heavenly blessing). We are controlled by time and there is always a shortage of it when you want it most, like spending time with a loved one, and a surplus of time when you need it least, like when that loved one is far away.

I’m sure there are proponents out there for time, probably in the form of lobbying organizations or a large corporation like Timex and Seiko. They are the ones who push age old clichés like “better late than never” and “time heals all wounds”. Well, I say “bah” to those promoters of seconds, and minutes, and hours, and days, and months and years. Time has given me nothing but heartache and sorrow and while I consent to the logic that cuts will turn into scabs and eventually into scars with the passing of time, I won’t succumb to the idea that time is always a beneficial thing. It is still my enemy, especially now. Especially today.

Despite my illogical hatred of time, I still run, but I’ve given up running marathons. It’s too much on the knees and the time you need to invest to train properly is too much to juggle with everything else that saps my days. Getting old sucks. But still I run, and this chapter in my life is just another leg of the long race that is my life. The difference is, of all the other legs I’ve ran before I knew that the pain in my joints and the burning in my chest would only last for a little while because I was armed with the knowledge of the distance to that next rest stop. I had one year to endure in Iraq before I could returned safely, had to suffer through 4 years before I eventually graduated college, and Christmas morning finally came after a few hours. There were, in fact, definitive stopping points in my life that I mentally and emotionally prepared myself to hold out for. Only this time, I don’t know where that next rest stop is or how long I have to go before I can take a break from this internal aching (and it is a far worse feeling than the modified sitting pee-pee dance).

Curse you time.