What Could Have Been

The vast majority of my training is done by myself. It gives me a lot of time to think which is both good and bad. While I was riding at the Palmer Urban Mountain Bike Park yesterday, I was thinking about what might have been. I remember running the mile for gym class. I wasn’t that far off from the 8th grade record. If my memory serves me right, my time was something like 5:04 or 5:06. One of my other classmates ran 5:02. I would like to see if anyone still has those records laying around somewhere, but they’re probably long gone. I also remember running a cross country meet. My memory is a little fuzzy, but I think my time for the 2 mile race was 13:23. At least that’s the time that sticks in my head.

I’m solely responsible for the course my life took. I have no one to blame but myself. No one told me that running a 5 minute mile in 8th grade was a big deal. Since several of my classmates were in the same range, I didn’t think much of it. Even the 2 mile race that I remember running was an average pace of about 6:42. The extent of my training was what we did in gym class and track and cross country practice. There really wasn’t much formal training.

Unfortunately, when I was a freshman in high school, I decided to pick up the lovely habit of smoking cigarettes. Essentially, my running career was over before it had even started. One day, the cross country coach saw me smoking. He told me that I wasn’t eligible to go out for cross country in the fall. Big deal, didn’t care. I was a teenager and I knew everything. Running ceased to play any part in my life at all and I traded running shoes for cigarettes and guitars. I wanted to be a rock star and that was my singular focus.

I took almost 25 years before I rediscovered my love for running. I switched from cigarettes to vaping in 2015 and then quit vaping on August 17th, 2018. I had started walking on my lunch break and would walk 3-4 miles each day. On September 6th, 2018 I decided to start running and ran my first mile. It was more of a run/walk but it was still my first attempt at running.

The years between this run and the present day have had its share of ups and downs, but my progress has been fantastic. According to the website SmashRun I’ve done the following:

• 167 5ks PR: 19:11
• 195 10ks PR: 38:59
• 41 Half Marathons PR: 1:30:40
• 9 Marathons PR: 2:57:28
• 3 Boston Marathons Course PR: 3:12:45

What I consider to be my best run ever, was the Hot Chocolate 15k in Chicago in 2021. My official time was 58:32. I had an average pace of 6:11 per mile. I placed 4th in the 40-44 age group. Overall, I was 41st out of 5,401 participants.

All of this is a long way of asking myself: “What could I have done had I never started smoking?” What would my high school running have been like? Would I have been a contender for a regional, sectional, or even state title? Could I possibly have had a collegiate career in running? Would I have gotten burned out either physically or mentally and stopped running after high school and/or college? So many unknowns that float through my mind as it tends to wander when I’m running or riding my bike. The best that I can do is focus on myself and my future in running, but these thoughts will always haunt me.