Run and Smell the Flowers

Running, it's supposed to be fun as well as exercise. It's always exercise, but it isn't always fun! However, I can tell you a secret that has made it much more fun and meaningful to me over the last 3 years:

When I run, I smell the flowers, well I at least look at them. I don't just glance, but I take them in. I hope this is elementary to most of you, but I had been running for well over a decade before I took notice of the beauty around me. This is sad, because one of my favorite and most vivid running memories is of doing a training run while pushing my then 4-year-old daughter in the baby jogger and having her ask me to stop so we could pick the flowers. I'll admit that I was training to qualify for the Boston Marathon and didn't want to stop, but I have always been glad that I did. We stopped for maybe 5 minutes and picked some flowers. But these were flowers that I hadn't even seen, that I don't even remember. We stopped because Ali wanted me to, and those are moments that one just shouldn't pass up! No, it was another 5 years after that when I was running in my favorite place in the USA, Northern California before I ever noticed a flower while I was running. I had just finished a brutal training run (I loved it!) in Eureka while visiting my mother and the two nuns she lived with (my mother was also a nun in that order), when Sister Teresa asked "Did you notice the wildflowers?" This question took me by surprise. I was training for a the Great Eastern Endurance 100K Run, held in the rugged Shenandoah Mountains, I wasn't concerned with flowers. Besides that, I'm a macho, toenail pulling, beer-swilling, sports-loving, hard case. I aint no Nancy-boy flower watcher! Until then. Sister Teresa took me outside and showed me some California's beautiful plants. Later that day we went to a nursery and bought some indigenous plants for their garden. The next morning when I got back from another long training run, she didn't even have to ask me, I described the flowers, and there were so many, that I viewed.

Now it's not just flowers I notice. It's stars, it's fireflies, it is sometimes a single leaf on a tree.

In the 2005 version of Western States in the Sierra Nevada mountains I stopped just before the coming to the American River near mile 70 and spread my arms as I looked at a clear sky full of stars. At Bighorn in Wyoming the stars were so bright against the mountain landscape that I stopped a train of runners and held my arms upward; the other two runners gasped, as they noticed the majesty of my vision. This summer in Vermont at around mile 32 the flowers were so bright and vivid that their beauty literally brought tears to my eyes (I am sure Becky thought it was the tough climb up the mountain, but it was the flowers.)

The places that we run are such a gift if we let them be. These places aren't just in the Mountains of California, Wyoming and Vermont. A year after my "awakening" in California, I was doing a loop in Croom that I have done 100's of times, and was literally brought to my knees as I prayed and thanked God for the beauty that surrounded me in a field of flowers. In the last 7 years I have probably run more miles in Croom than any other human, and yet, I had never noticed the flowers, I had never accepted that gift.

If you haven't run and smelled the flowers you should.

Thank you Sister Teresa!