Pushing Through

Few of us will ever run a marathon. Several years ago, I won a 5K run for women in my age range (coming within a hair's breadth of beating the first place male) and I'm still bragging about it. I haven't run competitively since because there's nowhere to go from there but down. And I get older every day that I stay alive.

My point is that running 27 miles is more than most of us are up to, especially as we age. People do it, but it takes a lot of training. It takes a lot of commitment of both time and energy. And it takes the willingness to push through the wall you hit when your body say "no." From what I understand, it's that last factor that really makes the difference. And that's the topic of today's post.

Most of us would reject out of hand the suggestion that we could push through such a wall. But the reality is that we've all done it in one way or the other many times in our lives -- some of us daily -- yet we don't give ourselves credit for it and don't recognize our own strength.

Not to bring you down, but since my life is the only one I'm completely familiar with, I'm going to list a few examples of occasions when just getting out of bed took a lot for me. There was the time some of my high school "friends" played a cruel and humiliating "joke" on me, the time I went without food for five days because somebody stole my grocery money and I was too ashamed to admit it, and the time I got drugged and raped by two men I met in a club in Palm Beach. There have been jobs I lost and jobs I didn't get (when I really believed I should have). There was the little matter of my being pushed out of grad school in the middle of my dissertation after working for five years toward a PhD. And there was the day I got the phone call that my 22-year-old son was dead.

Are you shocked yet? These things happen to people. Not to mention car wrecks and medical problems you weren't prepared to pay for, relationships that ended and relationships that should have but didn't, and children you didn't expect (sometimes bringing their own problems over which you have no control). Life is just full to the brim with challenges. They come to all of us.

If you take a walk down your own memory lane, I'm sure you'll come up with a number of situations you're still unclear about how you pushed through. But you did. And that's my point.

Managing diabetes and all it may require -- losing weight and keeping it off, exercising when you're not in the mood, developing coping skills that will keep you moving until you get out of the dumps we all wind up in sometimes, and all the other nine million details that get added to your life the day you get the news of your diagnosis -- some days you feel on top of the world (more or less) and some days you just gotta push through it. But we have and we can. Remembering that can help us to do it.