This past labor Day found me running a local 5K race. It was a fundraiser and a community event. No pressure to break records or establish legacies, just a fun, relaxed family outing supporting a good and noble cause. For all intents and purposes, it shouldn't have been the kind of event that registered the slightest blip on my cerebral radar, but it did. I found myself breaking down the race in a way that was unexpected and surprisingly beneficial.

First let's just clear the air a bit – I'm not much of a runner. There I said it. I took up running  just over two years ago as a way to try to beat back time. I noticed the gray temples coming on and was feeling more than a little out of shape. Before that I would have told you without pause how stupid I thought the whole idea of running for sport was. I'm an outdoorsman. A hunter and a fisherman. A hiker and a camper. a splitter of firewood and a back country survivor. Well at least I like to think I'm all that. But a runner? Nah, forget about it. Nonetheless,  here I was. kick starting my holiday morning by running 3.5 miles along our local greenway with a hundred of my neighbors. And to beat it all, I was excited about it. I wanted to do well. I actually cared about my time and my experience. And somewhere about half way through the race I found myself waxing philosophic. I realized that not only was I totally into the run but my brain was working overtime connecting unexpected dots. I was drawing parallels to other areas of my life.

Most of us will look to those around us for cues in how to approach our daily tasks. For example if we want to know how much energy we should put toward that next client meeting, we'll likely watch our boss. He'll certainly give us an indication of the level of importance. Maybe we're unsure how fast we can drive without getting a ticket, easy, we just monitor the cars around us and stay just under the aggregate. It was exactly that kind of audit I was attempting to undertake as I was huffing it through my second mile. I noticed that when I fell in behind certain folks I got winded quicker than usual and when I was behind others I immediately knew I was underperforming. I was looking to my fellow runners for my cues and it was backfiring. What to do? I was either headed for a lackluster finish or I was gonna drop dead of a heart attack. My only choice was to switch gears and start setting my own pace. I had to quickly learn to let some folks pass me by while wasting no time getting out in front of others. I had to rethink what has become second nature for a lot of us. I had to learn to ignore those around me in order to properly monitor my own progress.

Now you may be thinking this is too simple an idea to be wasting our time talking about, but it certainly felt like a revelation at the time (if not a full-blown side effect of hypoxia) and I'm not going to gloss over it. Nope, not for a second. Ya see, I'm convinced that it's these kinds of ah ha moments that if taken to heart can profoundly effect our daily lives. Think about it, what if we weren't wasting our time looking to our coworkers to see if our careers were on track. Or checking the wind to see if our family lives were headed in the right direction. What if we refused to allow TV or culture to set our expectations for a change and decided instead to pace ourselves based on goals we've set. Or better yet what if we decided to set our pace based on principles we've decided in advance to live by. Why that would make all the difference in the world, wouldn't it? Of course it would, and by golly I'm going to give it a try, starting now. Move outta my way slow pokes, here I come.

Photo attribution: The awesome  image featured above was found via Flickr's Creative Commons Library. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/