From what do you flee?

"I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of."
~Michel de Montaigne

There are a few times, or I guess more accurately, activities, when I am utterly sure of myself. During these, I enjoy lengthy periods of clarity in as much as my brain turns off, the questions desist, and I truly focus.

Running.

Playing music.

Doing an experiment in the lab.

The rest of the time the hole in my head is an unruly auditorium of unhappy citizens clamoring for a lynching. It is a mob scene. Though I have somehow prevented it from, well, preventing ME, it has been my lifelong companion. I sort of consider it as a crazy relative whom I just kind of ignore for the large majority of the year but must face at christmas or on summer vacation--only when forced to.

Do you ever look back at times in your life when you were really, really good at something, and wonder "will I ever be that good again?" I just scrolled down through my blog and saw my previous post about the Victoria Marathon, where I ran a 3:12 and change. And I thought "Wow, that was smokin' fast. I will never do that again." I look at that picture--however defeated I may seem--and realize how freakishly fit I was to be able to run that with as little training as I enjoyed.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized as I got ready for that race that I looked at myself during Ironman 2009 and thought the same thing when I looked back at 2007. And I crushed my 2007 time, and felt stronger.

I suppose the point of this rambling is that no matter what the event or subject matter or activity, some of us are born to question ourselves. We question our value, our abilities, our worth, our fitness. And we always will. The real question becomes, do we listen to those questions and let them slow us down? Or do we live with them and persist and use them as a tool to get better? I think it varies, even within each of us, from day to day. Somedays it seems impossible to be good enough just for me, let alone anyone else. Other days I feel like I need everyone else to give me a freakin' break.

Every time I run I worry that I will never get back to where I was. Honestly. This is a fact I do not admit often, to many. It is true. Every single time I run I worry that my best is behind me, and that scares me to death. It absolutely terrifies me that someday my decline will begin and I will no longer be able to improve. And that is inevitable, I know. It is a fact of life, an inescapable truth.

So how do I deal with it? I guess time will tell, because right now, I choose to run from it.