Life is a Highway

Joy here...I really love the metaphor that life is a highway.

I remember some 20 years ago when I was in high school and my friends and I would raise our arms, clapping along (me probably slightly off-beat) and blurting out the lyrics at the top of our lungs (me probably very off-tune) with Tom Cochrane.

But somehow like some guy whose glory days were back in the halls of his high school as he reigned supreme on some varsity team and dated some cheerleader, his life never reaching that pinnacle again, I seem to have forgotten the forward-motion implied in the life is a highway metaphor.

Vintage Joy:  The Highschool Years

You see, I never was a super athlete with all sorts of glory days to fall back on.  But as I grapple with feeling a sense of fitness loss right now, I can't help but think of things in terms of "recapturing" or "getting back" former levels of fitness rather than just an onward trajectory through life.  It's as though on some level I'm thinking well, I used to be fit, so I just need to get back to that fit place.  When, in fact, that's a rather bizarre way to think about life.

If life is a highway, then the metaphor would suggest that as I trundle along, there'll be speed traps, wrong exits, hills, valleys, passing lanes, and toll booths that I will go through all before the day that I close my eyes for good (which is hopefully a long way off).  But thinking about "recapturing" or "getting back" something from the past implies a kind of weird circularity to this highway...more like contrived race track that just goes around and around and around...

Who knows what lies beyond the dark and twisty turns of
life's highway?

And since I truly believe that sport is a metaphor for life, and the lessons it can teach go way beyond how far you might run, how fast you might be, or how your race went.  So as I grapple with my fitness not being exactly where I'd like it to be in the here and now, I'm going to remind myself to resist the temptation of thinking about my past fitness.

Life is a highway, and I might be in the slow lane now, but watch out...I like to go fast!

So if I've not really hit all my run workouts as I would have liked since returning from Australia, well, I'm just going to keep my eyes on the horizon before me as the highway stretches onward!

Over and out,
Joy

PS - Here are my run stats for the last week since our return:
Aug 28: Ran for a total of 18:56 for a distance of 3.09km with an avg. pace of 6:07min/km.
Aug 29: Ran for a total of 15:02 for a distance of 2.5km with an avg. pace of 6:01min/km.
Aug 31: Ran for a total of 30:00 for a distance of 5.1km with an avg. pace of 5:53min/km.
Sept 2: Ran for a total of 20:00 for a distance of 3.2km with an avg. pace of 6:15min/km.
Sept 4: Ran easy for 20 minutes (didn't wear Garmin, so lacking full data)
Sept 5: Ran for a total of 15:17 for a distance of 2.5km with an avg. pace of 6:07min/km.