Saucony 2009XC - Nate Jenkins

“The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, nobody is going to hit as hard as life. But it ain’t how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. That’s how the wining is done!”- Rocky Balboa in Rocky Balboa (Aka Rocky 6)

I think we all have our ups and downs in sports as well as life. I think running in particular is a perfect analogy for life. In my case running and life have pretty much become one intermingled thing. I tend to be a streaky person in terms of emotions, luck and generally how I’m doing in the race of life. A Rilo Kiley song I love says “sometimes when you’re on, you’re really f#*@ing on and your friends sing along and they love you. But the lows are so extreme the good seems f#*@ing cheap and it teases you for weeks in its absence.” This tends to be how I feel about my luck as well as my emotional state. When I’m “on” everything seems to go my way: I’m the life of the party and I get every possible advantage, I feel as though I am a man of destiny and all the forces of heaven and earth are making my path for me. It’s during times like that when I say things are “turning up Jenkins.” But when it turns, and it always does, the opposite is just as true. I feel I can’t catch a break to save my life. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong from the big things to the smallest inconvenience. I am a man who has had some fights with what Churchill called the “black dog” and when the chips are down I often have trouble getting out from under him.

I’ve been down a lot more than up lately. Life has been taking its shots and as Rocky says “ain’t nobody that hits harder then life.” But like the Japanese say the greatest honor is not in triumph but in getting up every time you are knocked down and Rocky would agree with that as well.

We all have our tests we need pass; we all face uphill battles we do not believe we can fight. We see the challenge before us and know we are not equal to the task, we aren’t talented enough, we aren’t strong enough, we aren’t smart enough, or we don’t have the support to get it done. But the true measure of our success is not in triumphing, it is in truly giving our all in the attempt, in never giving in no matter how bad we want to. No matter how impossible it may seem or actually be.

It’s been nearly two years since I ran a decent marathon. In that time I have had ups and downs. But man, I’ll tell you that not running a decent marathon has dominated the landscape of my psyche. Since the ‘ups’ of being selected to run for the USA in the world championships and beginning to get ahead of the hamstring problem that had been largely responsible for my inability to race well over the long distances, my distances, I have been knocked back to my knees. It is the same old story, one injury and set back becomes another, first my SI joint inflamed so that even sitting, laying down or driving a car was excruciating, then the ITB flared from working out too aggressively on the Alter G. The whole time I was spiraling down into worse and worse anemia, not knowing why or how. Heck I was taking iron. Also I got the run around because a small infection in my system threw off my blood work and sent the dr’s in the wrong direction for a bit. In the mean time normal life problems were kicking up. The car broke down, twice, the bills from the Dr’s added up to more than 10% of what I’ve made in the last year, before taxes. The bill collectors were calling, the races were awful so no money was/is coming in, I was sleeping 12 hours a night and waking up exhausted, even easy runs were leaving me crushed at the end of the day. But it will swing, it has to swing. Besides, stopping and not moving forward never did anyone any good. The key is to always move forward because just when you can’t take anymore you may be one more step or one more small climb from breaking the tide and having things swing in your favor. Quitting before you’re done is never the answer. This is life. It’s like swinging on a trapeze without a net below you so no matter how bad those forearms and fingers are screaming you need to hold on, not for as long as you can but for as long as you have to. As Winston Churchill said “It is not always enough to do our best, sometimes you must do what is required.”

Now I feel as though after a long night I can see the first signs of light on the horizon. I once read a great story, most likely apocryphal, about Herb Elliot that both speaks to the fitness and will of the great champions and to this situation very well. It seems Percy Cerutty, Elliott’s legendary coach sent Herb to do a hard run in the sand dunes of Portsea as he often did. While Herb was running, Cerutty, very fit but already in his 60’s, went for a hard swim in the bay. It seems that there was, unbeknown to either of the men, a storm passing by out at sea that caused the tides to be much stronger than normal. Swimming by the mouth of the bay Cerutty was caught in this powerful outgoing tide and fight as he might he was being sucked out to sea. It was at this time that a very tired Elliott arrived back on the beach, and scanning the water he saw his friend and mentor fighting futilely against the sea. He leaped into the ocean and reached Cerutty as he was just going under. Elliott put the small man, limp from exhaustion under his arm and began to swim against the tide. Still they were being sucked out. He swam harder but at his best all-out effort he found all he could do was hold their position against the out rushing tide. Failure was assured, Death himself stood on their shoulders. Yet somehow Herb refused to think, refused to feel pity, refused to quit, he was like the small bird in DH Lawrence’s poem who felt no pity for itself. He fought not because he could win but because he had one more stroke, one more kick in him and so this epic battle continued. Death was forced to wait for the inevitable as Elliott would not give in to the tide until his massive heart and his powerful muscles failed him. He the man in the mind, the soul in the body would not quit, the flesh and blood would have to fail. For time unmeasured the battle continued with no spectators, except of course the specter Death, until the cold blue abyss at last yielded and the tide shifted in. Elliott now moved forward and dragged both himself and his coach to the shore where they lay barely alive, but alive.

I now can feel the stirring around my feet and arms of the tide shifting. Unlike the Great Herb Elliot I have not been alone in my struggles, but so rarely are any of us truly alone. The unwavering support of my girlfriend, Gary and many of the runners who I talk to daily in person and through the internet. As well as the more materially tangible support of use of the alter G treadmill from the sports spa, affordable chiropractic and body work, as well as some incredible free fresh veggies from a local runner who’s day job is as a farmer. It is thanks to this support that I have turned the corner and stopped feeling bad for myself and started getting back to where I should be in terms of fitness and performance.

I have begun to run slightly faster on the workouts, no new injuries have cropped up; the old ones have begun to ebb. The fight is not over, even as things seem to slowly turn in my direction nearly every run is a fight. On my long run Monday within the first 30 minutes I had to jump into the woods and a porto-potty for, how should I say… emergency relief, a gift from the large doses of Iron I’m taking to get past the anemia, and I was stung on the forehead by a hornet. Nothing that will kill you but enough that when you’re already down it sure makes you feel like you’re fighting against the current. But still, the run got done and with each day the fight to move forward does not feel as hopeless. It is no longer without any reward, without any sign of hope. I am moving ever so slowly forward, the hour is late, probably too late, but I have overcome the ledge I couldn’t imagine coming over and I am that much stronger mentally and physically for having faced my own weakness. I have stared into the darkness of a moment of weakness and the darkness flinched first.

What it takes to crack each of us is a personal thing, not a steady set thing, but instead a complex equation of all the factors of a given moment and challenge but what is the same is that for each of us the measure of us as humans isn’t outside accolades, arbitrary times, pay checks or victories. The measure of each of us is in standing up one more time even though there is no way we could, in giving that full effort that is beyond what can be seen from the outside and only known to us in the grey of our innermost self. I have lasted one day more than I thought I would and now I move forward to compete for my country on the second biggest stage available, where just to compete is the biggest honor of my life, the greatest gift I have ever received and the most defining accomplishment of my life. I have but a few weeks to drag my battered body to that starting line but now I know I will drag it there in better shape than it is today. I will drag it there with fight in my belly and hopefully in my legs and lungs as well.

That is my two cents for the day but I implore you to keep up your own good fight and I hope that knowing that we all face these challenges will give you more strength to take one more step forward to push for one more second the next time you’re up against the immovable object or the irresistible force. Because that one more second may be the penultimate one that swings the weight of the world from being against you to being for you but even if it isn’t that step was still worth it if only for the beauty of a person going beyond their limit in the face of the impossible.