"Hey, do you want to do cross country with me?" she asked.
"Huh. Ok," I agreed, my 14 year old impulsive brain giving it very little thought. Then, "MOM! CAN I DO CROSS COUNTRY? IT STARTS TOMORROW."
I had NO idea what I was getting myself into. (And the friend who called me didn't make it past the introductory meeting with the coach that day- after he told us we'd be doing our "double sessions" in the mountains, running and hiking 10 hours by day, camping in tents by night.)
The first day of practice, we were sent on a 4 mile loop. I ran maybe 1.5 miles and stopped. "What?" I grimaced. "Everyone else is still running? How is that possible?" What had I done wrong? I chugged along, run-walking, flabbergasted. All the girls made it look so easy. I MUST have been doing it wrong.
That season, I persisted at being very good at bringing up the rear. As a new runner I was scared, but determined. I listened intently to our awesome coaches (and to wildly inappropriate stories from the girls for my naive ears) and tried to learn and adopt the running mindset. We ran an invitational meet in a massive deluge and I sat shivering on our steamy bus, mildly terrified of an unknown coach who came on and yelled, "If you don't want to run in the rain, join the math team!" Displeased at his implication that there was something wrong with the math team, I managed to run a very fun race in the woods, splooshing through wet leaves and dodging puddles. Our lovable but difficult to please coach (not the yeller in this story.) told me I did a nice job.
I was hooked then on running, but I hated racing. H. A. T. E. D. It invariably ruined my day because running that fast always made me feel like puking and I always came in last. Every time we had a race, which was usually twice a week, I'd spend all day debating how I could get out of it. Fake an injury? Fake an illness? We'd warm up and a little voice in my head would say, "Do it! Do it now. Tell coach you're not running." But I never did.
Well ok maybe once.
But I wasn't happy about it. I wasn't a quitter.
I stuck it out and finished the season, still having no idea what I was doing, still always coming in last. ("Oh, you must not have been last every time!," you say. Oh yes. I was last. Every. Time.) Accomplishments included edging close to a 25 minute 5K, and completing a momentous 7 mile "LSD" (long slow distance, which made us giggle every time.) But I was still last.
At the team dinner at the end of the season, the coach began to present what he called the "Fukawi Award."
"...This girl was running a race in the woods and got lost. When she eventually emerged, having no idea what was going on, she shouted, "Where the fukawi?!"
He said he had contemplated giving it to me ("Sciacca!", the girls gasped at him.) but ultimately gave it to our assistant coach, who was precious and possibly equally deserving of the award.
What this boils down to, is that I'm still a fukawi. I just have more experience and am more at ease being one. That's the thing with running. You have to be ok with being anxious about not knowing what's going to happen. Every time you set out to run, you're putting yourself out there and making yourself vulnerable to a little discomfort, of course with the potential for big payoff and delicious endorphins. I still experience the internal battle of whether I'm actually going to lace up or not on a given day, and sometimes the battle continues until nighttime.
Running is about being ok with the fukawi mindset in that we don't always know or have control of what's going on. All we can do is work like crazy to improve, regardless of our circumstances.
