Defeat and de Feet

Show your feet some love, dudes.

I'm serious. Because when your feet suddenly don't work life becomes a bitch in a lot of surprising ways.

Let me back up a little and tell you the story: just over a week ago my buddy Nancy and I headed down to Red Deer to do the Super Spartan race, a 15k obstacle race (that's 9ish miles to anyone south of the border). We didn't train for it - that would be silly - and since we did it last year we figured we knew what we were getting into. Which was true as far as the course itself was concerned...I knew I was going to be slow, you know, based on the fact that I spent the last year gaining 50lbs and fighting with my health instead of training for an endurance event. What I didn't really consider was that my feet would decide in the first half mile (800m for the Canajuns - see what I did there?) that this whole enterprise was a mistake and that my dogs would bark at me for the rest of the month for my tomfoolery.

So here's how the day went:

Mile 0.5 Realized that blisters were going to be a problem.
Mile 3 Aid Station: asked a medic for some band aids. They replied that they could give me band aids IF I was willing to fill out a form and drop out of the race. Not likely!
Mile 5 Don't think about feet don't think about feet don't think about feet don't think about feet.
Mile 5.5 Noticed blood coming through my shoes.
Mile 6 Blood has lubricated trouble spots nicely! This isn't so bad. What a beautiful day! WHEEEEE this is awesome!

Mile 8 Seeing stars. Starting to not feel very good.
Finish Line: Actually I don't remember much about the finish line except wanting to punch the volunteer who gleefully insisted that burpees don't count unless our chests touch the ground. I think those last 30 burpees took about 15 minutes.
Medical tent: walked in to ask for some band aids. Medic looked at my bleeding shoes and my ashen face and told me to sit down for an assessment. The shoes came off, and the medic actually gagged and called a couple more people over to help.

Fast forward 9 days and I still can't walk normally and I wish I could say I've learned my lesson. Well, maybe I have: gonna actually train for next year. But we got our finisher t-shirts! Fuck yeah!

So let's talk about defeat and perception thereof. I've been mulling this over lots lately given my current situation: started a business which didn't quite go as planned due to health problems and associated self-induced mental fuckwittage, accepted a job which will force me to bust through some boundaries but in the meantime is making me feel kind of...well...very conscious of my shortcomings to put it mildly (which is my issue and no one else's and I fully accept that), and it just generally feels like survival over the past six months has been like pushing an elephant up a ladder. It's getting kinda old.

 Still, (unlike the Spartan sitch) I actually did learn some really good lessons so do I chalk the whole shebang up as a fail? The pessimist in me wants to say yes but I kinda don't want to see it that way. For one thing, if I accept defeat then the door has to close and I will have to find something else to fight for. And while that part would be easy because there are a million things that are worth fighting for, there will always be this hanging what-if thing happening inside my melon. And like I said before, I don't want to - there's still work to do and things seem to be on the upswing. So on that count, lesson learned. Adversity has the potential to make us better if we let it! Gonna sign off now before I get tempted to insert trite quotes from Finding Nemo, even though it applies...

Not gonna say it!