Struggling-It's What We Do.

Even in the rain it was an enjoyable run. I’d been struggling with my running more than normal. Yes, struggling is part of running. I would venture to say five of seven days per week of running are most difficult for me. My little sister, in 1994 at age 18 thought running long-distance was easy for me. I explained to her as my husband, and I took her away in June of 1994 to Disney in Florida. It was our high school graduation gift to her. She’d brought up the running subject because I’d just run eight miles that afternoon in what was Florida’s humid and 107-degree, sunny weather that day.

She stated, “Running is so easy for you…” I remarked, “No. Running is difficult most days for me. And I think it’s difficult for most long-distance runners initially and the difficult runs ebb and flow. But most days, you have to encourage yourself to get out and run the miles.” She was stunned.

Many years ago, our youngest daughter loved to talk about earthworms. It was her curiosity of where worms and things came from. Too, she had this comedic way of wondering what worms were thinking. Perhaps this came about when I taught our daughters how to fish. They were not quite ages three and five on our first fishing adventure. I couldn’t wait to teach them how to fish, my husband thought it was cute but never had fished, nor learned how to and at the time expressed no interest in joining us for a fishing expedition. That in itself was comical, for he was an outdoorsy type in all other ways of the word outdoorsy.

In lieu of our youngest daughter understanding that when using a bobbin for fishing, we would buy live earthworms at the camping stores. Back then you’d buy earthworms by the dozen. They were placed in a Styrofoam container, with a flimsy plastic lid on top and the container held the earthworms in a soil made just for them.  

Our oldest wanted to fish, yet the idea of touching an earthworm kind of freaked her out. She didn’t want to hold the earthworm container whilst we drove to the fishing site. Meanwhile, our youngest wanted to hold the container of earthworms as we drove to the ponds. Too, she even wanted to pet the worms. I had to explain to her that they really needed to be kept in the cooler, and out of the sunlight for it would kill them. She’d acquiesce.

After a few times going on fishing adventures, she would look for worms here and there, sometimes in our yard. And she’d began to name the worms that we’d fish with and the ones she would find in our yard and perhaps other places. The only problem was, she must have known something biological about worms for she named every one of them Bob.

I don’t know how many earthworms our youngest had named Bob, but it probably was well over 100 earthworms. Then she told me that they played a game in the dirt and how they played the game. I wondered not only what the name of game was, but what it represented.  She said, “Struggle, that’s the game. Because that’s what they do.” Then she showed me with her hands how they struggled in the soil to maneuver through it. And that they played nice as they worked through the soil.

So, here we have a four-year-old making up a game, that represented life. Because even we humans struggle to understand, to get through, to care and so forth. And here a four-year-old understood that. She hadn’t even met some of the severely ill and disabled people I did therapy on in my office. Yet somehow, she understood life had its struggles and could verbally communicate it with compassion at such a young age. She felt part of their world, because she knew that struggling was part of life’s adventures. And that every day there’s a moment of struggling we encounter no matter who we are.

So, as in running we experience life differently with various struggles. Yet in the contours of our long-distance run we may encounter a hill to run up. Then we either look to the top of the hill in hope or on bad days we look down and tell ourselves to keep going, because hope feels lost for whatever reason in those moments as we struggle. Sometimes we reckon our struggle and other times not so much. But at the end of each run hopefully we’re just grateful to have traversed the ground mile after mile. For we’ve danced with our demons mentally at Mach 5.---Jody-Lynn Reicher