Recovering What You've Lost

I met a new friend today at the track.  This is  our second get together as we  walk and run and talk and share our lives as we work out.  We are both working to get back into shape and become more slim.  Both of us agree it has been and continues t o be our  life long pursuit.  Both of us are  working to recover the health and fitness that we have lost....or working to recover the fitness that was had before a recent injury...or we are working to recover what we once were as athletes.

For me, I am recovering what was lost a long while back when I was a young teenager.  It was the time for the presidents physical fitness test.  We had to run a timed 400 meters once around the track.  Being already chubby and certainly not training to do this o r to run at all, I did not make it around and had to walk myself in. All the kids laughed at me and made fun of me.

In my adult life now as a runner, I went through a phase saying to myself, I wish that long ago,  some nice kid or the gym teacher could have walked me  in and companioned me to the finish line when I took that  physical fitness test long ago.For years, I could not make it once around the track. Then I realized that the adult Cece is a runner and she can now help the little girl of the past to the finish lines whenever that little one feels like giving  up.  After I realzed that, the track did not seems so large and  I knew I could make it!  I realized that I was carrying baggage in my brain about track running.

Now I know that I can recover what was lost on that track all those many years ago.  I can do this by  by running that 400 meters in the Sr. Olympics City games  coming up on 5/12/18.  This is a way, I can recover what was lost years a go.  Is it the exact same thing?  No, but I can prove to myself that I can do it! Actually, I have already proved to myself that I can do it.

As the universe would have it, in a run last week, I was on my way back into the finish line and all of a sudden I saw my coach come running out.  She companioned me in and ran me into the  finish line.   This fact also recovered what I had lost all those years ago,,, the desire for support and kindness.  ...and PS,  my coach did not know this story.

I believe that  in some occasions we really need to have a "do over" of a traumatic event...so we can do it correctly this time....so that we can recover what we have lost...so that it does not prevent us from succeeding in the future.

When I was teaching school too, when a child did something very wrong...at the soonest opportunity, I gave them the chance to do  the exact same thing over but correctly this time....it provided a healing element that allowed the child
 to" keep moving forward" on a positive rather than negative track.

So, when you see me crying my eyes out for joy on Saturday, you will know that  I have recovered the track race that the little one  could not run ....oh so many years  ago..
Cece/Sisi