Somewhere in the middle of March 2020, on a Saturday morning, I woke up well before sunrise. I rolled off of the mattress that lay on the floor just in front of the kitchen counter and turned my alarm off. One muffin and a short drive later, I was standing amongst hundreds of people wearing neon clothing, all tightening their shoelaces or stretching some hidden muscle. That was the day I ran a half marathon. That’s 21 kilometres for anyone who doesn’t know; which is, by my estimate, about 21 kilometres longer than most people want to run at sunrise. Thankfully I completed the half marathon with a good friend of mine, he kept my spirits light and what could have been an arduous morning turned out to be quite pleasant. But only quite. Some two hours and forty minutes later I lay on the grass just next to the finish line, trying to coax breath back into my lungs.
The Monday that followed my race, a huge announcement shook the nation: we were in quarantine. You don’t need me to explain this to you, we all lived it. In South Africa the regulations were especially strict, though, and we couldn’t leave our homes for weeks, except when strictly necessary. As a result, my running habit seamlessly dissolved into a Netflix and YouTube binging habit.
Today, more than three years after that race, I am not very running fit. Here and there I’ve hobbled a long and dreary 5k, but I am nowhere near the comfort and fitness level I once was. The only reason I know this is because I have recently started running again. I am going to run my second half marathon in August or September this year. That doesn’t seem very specific, you may be thinking. Well, I haven’t signed up for any one race, I just want to get back into it.
I have never been a natural runner. I was sort of forced into running - extra curricular sport was compulsory at my high school and I was a shockingly bad hockey, soccer and cricket player. The least painful choice was running. Slowly, my confidence grew and I became a more capable runner. To be clear, I still shuffle. Some of my friends seem to effortlessly weave through the landscape like they are a part of it. That is not me. And yet, something began to stir in me earlier this week.
In the middle of my 2k, I began to dream. This time around, I want to finish my half marathon in under two hours. I was overcome with confidence and hope. Why can’t I do it? I thought. I wanted to push myself, see how far I could go, I really wanted to be a faster runner. Keep in mind, I am only just fit enough to finish a 5k, if that. And now I have a time goal? There was this big, unreasonable desire in my heart to see what I was made of, see how much I could achieve.
I found myself reflecting - isn’t the human spirit a wonderful thing? I didn’t want to settle on a reasonable goal for my running, I imagined something bigger, more exciting, more challenging. Think of all the artists, architects, leaders, soldiers, scientists who pushed themselves much further than anyone imagined they might. Think of all the times people have said, “That’s not good enough, we can do better.” The cities we’ve built, people we’ve saved, inventions, discoveries, monuments, movements - think, for a moment, of all the beautiful things that we have created because of yearning. Beyond a certain threshold, between attainable and impossible, is the perfect balance of intrigue and desire, and I believe that it is in this place where humans and our societies grow the most.
I don’t want to attribute too much value to the ideologies of discovery and desire. Both human attributes can become ugly when pushed too far. But for a moment, consider all the beauty in our lives that we owe, in part, to yearning. It could be anything, from completing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, to the first time you own a home, to the first time you hold her hand. When a thought is scary, but just possible enough to pull off, it won’t let go of me. That, to me, is yearning, and I think it’s crazy how bottomless mine seems to be. It does not obey reason. It is unquenchable. For most of my life the idea of running a half marathon was impossible. And I did it! Wasn’t that enough for me? It seems that my body wants more, it has to know what waits around the next corner, it wants to push. So even though a two kilometre run at a below average speed had me gasping for air, my mind still told me, maybe I could even do it in one hour fifty…