Tomorrow is a new day....

Robert Frost was a great American poet.  He is also perhaps the most quoted, second only to Longfellow or maybe TS Eliot.  So, as I hold a degree in English Literature, it was really only a matter of time before I quoted one of those guys! A classic Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken," is filled with quotable lines that can be extrapolated and applied to any person who has ever set foot out their door on a quest for fitness, for a PR, or for a BQ.  While everyone must be familiar with the final lines, the lines that stand out in my mind are: "And both that morning equally lay/ In leaves no step has trodden back/ Oh, I kept the first for another day!"

"Oh, I kept the first for another day!"

I love it!  There, in a poem that traditionally lends itself to a melancholy interpretation full of regret, is a line full of hope.  It is perhaps the only optimistic line in the entire poem.  Love. It.

The reason I bring this up is that I, just as all runners, have suffered some set-backs in my training.  A pulled muscle here, a migraine there, and a full-time work schedule everywhere really puts a cramp on training sometimes.  And the truth of it is that no, I don't get every run in at precisely the time I want to.  Sometimes I am not able to get the run in at all.  And that is OK.  It is OK because tomorrow is a new day and to have a truly new day you have to let go. The narrator in the poem can't let go. The narrator spends his whole life wondering what if, rather than living.  I don't want one rough day or one bad week to derail me so much that in twenty years I write a poem encapsulating my regret (even if that poem would make me famous!).

I don't want to be Prufrock and count my spoons (yes, once you get an English major on a roll it is a hard train to stop!).  I don't want to count my miles for miles sake.  I want to remember each mile and soak in the lesson each stride teaches.  Its not the quantity that you run or the time frame in which you run but what you take away from each run, each mile, each step, each breath.  I don't want to be Frost and wonder about what would have been if I had returned for that other path on that other day.  I will take the road less traveled, but I will run down it and enjoy it and live it, and then I will return to take the other path.  And if I am not able to return to take the other path, I will not live in regret but rather live in satisfaction in knowing that I was present for each breath and each step.

Tomorrow is a new day.  To truly experience a new day in all it's glory you must let go of yesterday.  You must let go of your failures, but you must also let go of your successes.  If you live in the past you will never be present, and if you are never present you will never live.  And consequently, you will never make it to the next race!

Happy Trails....