Erasing the past.

This month there is a guest column in Runner's World by John "the Penguin" Bingham. He writes about runners who continue to run even through they're slow.

"The miracle isn't that I finish. The miracle is that I had the courage to start."

I wonder how much credit we really give ourselves for having started the insanity of triathlon. Sometimes, as I watch the pack move further and further aheard of me, leaving me alone, or perhaps with one or two (or no) stragglers running behind me, I feel much less like a winner...much less, oh I don't know, athletic. I feel like, as my eighth-graders put it, a wanna-be, or "poser".

What really ressonated, though, was how he wrote about running shoes as "erasers":

"Our running shoes are really erasers. Every step erases a memory of a past failure. Every mile brings us closer to a clean clate. Each footstrike rubs away a word, a look, an event, which led us to believe that success was beyond our grasp."

I started running at the age of 40. I was not an athlete in high school. I wasted a lot of my young life. I try not to perseverate on it. Now I have this wonderful mental image: when I run, every footstep that hits the ground erases years wasted--wasted in bad relationships, on welfare, laying on the couch, years spent smoking and eating badly.

I figure that the fact that I run as slowly as I do gives me more time to erase the past a little more slowly and carefully.