Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: FAMOUS (02/27/20)
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TITLE: Fun While It Lasted | Previous Challenge Entry
By Marilyn Borga
03/05/20 -
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A breakthrough came when my husband suggested that I increase my pace on the treadmill. “But I can barely do what I’m doing now!” I protested.
“You always go three miles anyway,” was his reasonable response. “If you try going a little faster, you’ll be miserable for less time.”
It made sense. I increased my speed just a mite each week and worked up to what might almost be considered more than a jog. Time was wasting. My two kids and my husband were participating in the Fourth of July 5k run at our local park. With much trepidation, I signed up also.
Race day came: the hottest, most humid day of the year. The course started with a steep hill and had several more hills sadistically thrown in throughout. I concentrated on pulling enough air into my lungs to survive and putting one foot after the other.
I was the last runner in, but I was alive and I had finished the race! Concerned with my brick-red face and shaky legs, my husband led me to the bleachers for the award ceremony, where my son, daughter, and he each received medals for placing in their perspective age groups.
The beauty in running in one’s “golden years”, as my kids like to say, is that there is very little competition. Although I had come in dead last in the race, I still placed second in the women’s fifty-five and over! I popped up and pranced over to greedily grasp my first-ever medal. This was more than I had dared to dream!
My accomplishment might appear ho-hum to young fleet-footed, long-legged natural athletes. But among my peers were sluggish couch potatoes whose most strenuous endeavor in the past forty years was a short chase in the parking lot after a run-away shopping cart. To them, this was fame! I eagerly waited for the results to be published in the newspaper; I read my name with a thrill. I was hooked!
I kept on training. In the next few years, my husband and I completed twenty-four races together. I never again came in last; sometimes I even managed to beat several younger runners. I was still chubby, my legs never lost their thickness, but I was probably more fit than I had ever been.
More pressing duties began taking up my time. Eventually, it took too much effort to keep training and my running career fizzled to an end. It was fun while it lasted, but seasons do come and go. I look back on those times as being worthwhile. My efforts helped me to be more healthy today than I might have been otherwise. But except for me, no one really remembers or cares that my name appeared in the newspaper. My short-lived fame has been packed away in my memories; the trophies and medals have been recycled. Earthly fame has lost much of its luster. I realize that it’s more important for my name to appear in the Lamb’s Book of Life than in any newspaper. So I’ve been training to finish my current race well, satisfied that the prize will be well worth every effort.
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But as it is written: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
Nor have entered into the heart of man
The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”
1 Corinthians 2:9 (NKJV)
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