One hell of a brick mason….

My life is full of walls… big tall brick ones. They are very sturdy and impressive… designed to be a barrier… to separate me from various people and things in my life.

These walls have sometimes been built by circumstances… other times they are built by others. The true master brick mason of the wall work in my world is yours truly. Yes, I have built some mighty impressive structures over my lifetime. I am so good at it, that I can rather stealth-fully build one to rival the Great Wall of China without even realizing that I was standing near a single brick. This proves to be quite frustrating at times. At other times, I just look at the wall and walk away.

I read somewhere recently that these walls in our lives are not there to keep us from things that we desire the most, but rather to help us determine which people and things we really and truly want in our lives. Are we really willing to do the hard work it will take to climb over or better yet, are we willing to do the necessary things to just tear the wall down?

This is the story of one wall….

There are some of you that know that I have been dealing with a wall for the last couple of months related to my running. Let me set this up. I run 3 days a week and do core strength work the other two days. My runs consist of a 5 mile run, a 4 mile run and a three mile run. It is rather strange but the one that has been giving me the most trouble over the last 2 months in the 3 mile run. See, I have been flirting with the 27:00 mark for that entire time. I just couldn’t break 27 to save my life.. I would get down to 27:04 then the very next week it would be back up to 27:15…. It didn’t matter how hard I tried or if I started fast and ended slow or started slow and ended fast. The results were the same. I had almost resigned myself to be the “27+ guy” forever.

And so I got on the treadmill again today… staring at all the numbers and things and thought I just don’t think I can do it… but I knew I had to try. I tried to let my mind go… to just forget about it. I was starting to think that I couldn’t even make it in under 30… much less 27. But I pushed… hard. I can’t remember the last time I felt like that when I was running… my lungs and my legs both burning…. screaming at me to just stop…. to just give up the craziness.

But as I said earlier… the wall was there… not to keep me from getting there, but to measure my desire. To see if I was willing to do what it would really take to get beyond that wall. See I know that I am a quitter. I have walked away from many walls in my life… to tired to scale them and not enough interest or energy to tear them down.

But there are others… that I will not let get the best of me… so, Friday, November 16, 2012…. I ran 3 miles. And when I looked down at the timer… it read 25:52. One more wall down. On to the next one!