Everything I know, I learned while running.

Well, not really. But I do tend to wax philosphical in those early morning hours when I'm pounding the pavement with no one else around. And I had some interesting thoughts this morning (at least, I thought they were interesting).

I took a sort of break from running for awhile. I still ran once or twice a week most of the time, but I spent a lot more time indoors on the elliptical machine when it started getting cold and dark in the mornings, and especially when my knee started giving me grief around November or December.

But the prospect of beginning marathon training in February (combined with this unusually warm January weather and the slowly lengthening daylight) has inspired me to get out the door and on the road more frequently again, and I am now back into a more-or-less regular running schedule. This happens almost every winter. When I'm limiting my running, I remember that I love to run. But when I start up again, I remember why I love to run. For awhile, every run is a fabulous run. I feel energetic and happy and excited about running, and about life.

But inevitably the reminder that running is one of my absolute favorite things to do is eventually followed by a reminder that the runner's high doesn't always happen. Today was that day for me. I rolled over and looked at the clock and the last thing I wanted to do was climb out of bed and put on my running shoes. I did manage to get myself out the door, and my legs just felt like lead, and though I was absolutely determined to make my six miles, it was kind of a struggle. (Maybe it was all that sugar I ate last night - yech! :P)

So I started thinking about that, and I started analogizing (and my train of thought managed to get my mind off of how crummy I felt so that it turned out to be a decent run after all). It seems like that's just how life is in general. Every once in a while we will make goals, or learn a principle (or relearn a principle, more often than not) and we are told that if we do then we will know. So when we decide to start working on getting more out of our scripture reading, or to reach out to other people more than we have in the past, or to keep our living space clean and organized, or to be a better student, we experience the "runner's high" once we actually get started. Things go well, we feel good about ourselves, our testimonies grow, we love other people more deeply - somehow our lives just seem better and we wonder why we didn't try this sooner.

But almost anything worth doing is not going to be consistently easy. I think that "runner's high" is there for a reason - Heavenly Father is going to let us know that what we're doing is good and worthwhile, and that helps us to stengthen our conviction, or our testimony. But once we've had that period of strengthening, once we've seen that what we're doing is good and that we're happier for it, we are then prepared for reality to set in.

And it does. We get distracted by school, we get hurt by people we are trying to love, we wake up one morning and find ourselves in a bad mood and can't begin to understand why, we do our best and still fail the quiz - we set out to run one morning and it's just hard. The thought of doing twelve miles on Saturday just seems impossible if we can't even do half that much today.

But that's what I've learned from running. Because if I can push through those six miles, if I can stay on track and just keep running through the hard days, that runner's high is going to come back. It always does, and the more I push myself (within reason, of course), the more frequently it comes and the more I just love to run. You just keep going, even when it's hard, and that's a princple that I am trying (often unsuccessfully) to carry over into the rest of my life. It's too easy to give up when the runner's high isn't there. It's too easy for me to think, "I'm not getting anything out of my scripture reading today, so I'll just postpone it until I'm in a more spiritual mood," or "I'm trying so hard to be more social, but I still feel disconnected from people, so why bother even trying?" or "I set a goal for myself and I break my resolve every single day - why am I doing this in the first place?" But if I have learned anything over the past few years, I have learned that these are the times when it is most important to push through. Because sometimes I give up, but sometimes I do push through, and I have seen the rewards that come from enduring.