Can.

I had an impromptu chat with one of my professors this morning as I was dropping off his mail. He occasionally reads my running blog and was asking about my injury and how things were going. I explained the situation, told him that I’d had about a week of wallowing, and what I was working on now to hopefully remedy the issue so I can do the April half (i.e. cross-training and strength/stretching).

He somehow managed to tie my current situation to one of his pet projects, John Benson Brooks, and the concept of the practice being the main event, not a goal. Just the doing. Enjoyment of the process.

He then talked about finding the wellspring of your drive to do certain things—what is it that drives me to run anyway? What was doing this half all about? Where does this need come from?

It stayed with me all day, and to be honest, it’s been difficult to pinpoint the exact wellspring since my feelings in the past several months have just been a blur of “WHEEEEEEEEEE RUNNIIIIIIIING!” When I thought long and hard about it, though, I realized that it boils down to one very simple tenet: I run to prove to myself that I can when I formerly thought I couldn’t.

Growing up, I didn’t impose many limits on myself—I believed in my intellectual abilities, my musical abilities, my ability to work hard and accomplish goals that I set. If I wanted to do something, I did it, and there was no question of if.

This belief in myself never extended to fitness and health. I never thought I could lose weight, so I didn’t try. I never thought I could be fit, so I didn’t try. I never thought I could find a form of exercise that I liked and gave me a sense of fulfillment, so I never tried. How I never saw past that cognitive dissonance in these different aspects of my life is beyond me now, at the sage old age of twenty-nine, but I didn’t. When it came to taking my health and fitness into my own hands, all I saw was a world of can’t.

Running symbolizes the can to me. And I’ve been kind of slogging through the motions of cross-training because it’s currently off-limits, but today made me realize the can encompasses so much more than just running. I’m still healthy. I’m still fit. I can still do so much more than I ever could before. And I can bring the same gusto to different forms of can than I have been. Biking and swimming and elliptical are not consolation prizes, they’re other ways for me to continue proving my can to myself.

I can’t wait until I can run again, truly. But my swimsuit arrives tomorrow and I’ve got a chance to investigate another form of physical betterment, so I’m going to treat it and all my other cross-training like the cans they are.