The Rock(short story)

During this past weekend I was mentally reminded of what training really means, and I mean training for anything. While I am referring to physical training this story could relate to anything we do in life. When you train for something that means you are preparing yourself for whatever confronts while in the given endeavor that you are training for. A good example would be when I was in college I would train myself to pass a test in Economics, but no matter what I did to train myself I just couldn't seem to get it done. So, my preparation must not have been very good or I was just plain Economics stupid(probably the case). Then when I trained for a football game I would go through the drills, get hit, hit somebody, trip at times, out run people at times, stiff arm people sometimes, get stiff armed, block somebody, get blocked, etc., but all in the name of training. That way when game time came around, I was prepared. Now what the hell does all of this gibberish have to do with this blog site and this writing, titled "the rock." Well here goes, some time ago, say about 29 years ago when I started long distance running I started doing something that prepared me for last weekend. Since I was doing a sprint triathlon in Alpine, Texas and the run discipline was first I found that about half way through I had a rock in my left shoe. Now this wasn't a boulder or anything like that but it was big enough to be a real nuisance. But as I had trained myself over the years to not stop and remove rocks from my shoe during training runs, I was properly trained to continue this race without stopping. So, what I did was move that little sucker around in my shoe so it rested under my arch and then I went back on my heal to toe and felt no pain. I ended up with a good run and the seconds I would have wasted getting rid of this little rock helped me to have a better time. My moral to the story is practice what your preach and be prepared for the worst, then when it doesn't come you will be one happy camper. One footnote, I won my age group because of this great training and it also helped that I was the only one in the 65-69 group, but I also beat the 70 year old, whooopie!!!

All for tonight, off to the lower valley to do some work(for a change),

greerman