Achilles Last Stand

Wandering & wandering, What place to rest the search
The mighty arms of Atlas, Hold the heavens from the earth
“Achilles Last Stand”
Led Zeppelin, Presence

Led Zeppelin was not much known for their lyrical abilities. “Achilles Last Stand” is no exception, though I did listen to it toward the end of my high school career often the day before races, pacing in circles around the grey room downstairs, pounding the walls with my fists and whipping up a generally agitated mood. The next day I was utterly focused; I glared at competitors imagining my eyes could drill through steel. And I won an awful lot.

Starting around my sophomore year in college, roughly coinciding with my spiritual revolution, I became less violently aggressive before races, and found more peaceful ways to become more focused. That remained a constant for me – the ability to focus singularly on a task, even despite my occasional inability to focus in many normal situations. I was driven. The only thing that limited my achievement was me, and I did basically everything I could to squeeze as many seconds out of myself as possible.

These days that is no longer the case. My achilles, both of them though mostly the left, are once more nearly debilitating. I have been taking ibuprofen and aspirin daily, I’ve been icing and stretching in a regimented manner, even tracking my completion of said tasks on a matrix taped to the side of the fridge, but it is not making a difference. My legs just feel like crap. I want to be fast, but I can’t. No amount of internal motivation will change that.

It’s a difficult problem for me and mostly because of my personal pride. I don’t stand out of many crowds intrinsically. I know that if you put a hundred random people together in a room, I’d be “smarter” by someone’s standard than all but a small handful. I’d be one of the better writers, one of the better photographers, one of the most successful, but not a statistical outlier in any of those categories, and it’s not like the man on the street would know the difference anyway. But as of 6 months ago, there was no way that more than 3,000 people in the country were faster than I. You’d have to fill a room with 100,000 random people before you started to see people that could beat me over 10K. Or a marathon. Or a mile, or 10 miles, anything really – I was comparatively relatively unique in that respect.

And since I have such a difficult time being otherwise noticed, a very public display such as running became the sort of thing that I could hang my hat on. It was part and parcel with my self worth. At my best, there were probably less than 100 people in this country who could beat me over 1000 meters – in reality, I had one of the top-10 fastest times out of all collegiates my senior year and college track is the hotbed for fast people. But I was never internally justified by it, not even then. At that point in my head it was understood that my times were too slow and I wouldn’t be able to be pleased with myself until I was another 2 seconds faster, until there were only 20 people faster than me, until, in the end, I was the best.

I get the feeling I still could not have justified myself via my own accomplishments even then. Running does not imbue self-worth upon anyone, just as writing doesn’t, photography doesn’t, being a number one draft pick, being elected president of a superpower, you name it; none of them will change anything. At some level, to be driven and ambitious is to not only be unsatisfied with one’s current condition, but also to be insecure with it. A proclivity toward insecurity is not rectified by continuing to address it using the same mechanisms which exposed that trait in the first place.

Where am I going with this? No where. I just want to run again. And I know that I want to do it so that I can know that whenever I walk into the room, even if I’m the least recognizable person there, I know in my heart of hearts that I’m the fastest one around. And this is not a good reason. I know that I need to be broken of this. There’s some irony in the fact that though my metaphorical Achilles Heel is my actual achilles, said injury is required to make me more whole in some almost too cheesy for the written word way. If I’m going to be stuck in a boot for six weeks, at least I’ll be able to smirk about that.

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