Dare to Dream — Legally Fit

There’s so much to dissect from that short, simple message, but that’s what I’ve been doing all week.  I’ll start with the last part.  Can we really do anything?  Literally?  No.  Sorry if you expected this blog to be more inspirational than that.  But let’s be real, I can’t win the career Grand Slam in golf.  I probably could not have even if I was handed a golf club at the age of two and never put it down since.  Or could I have?  The answer to that is simply that one can never know (as unlikely as it would have been), but therein lies the message.  Only the person that dares to dream knows themselves well enough to dream.  We each determine for ourselves what we think we can achieve – even if we may fail at it.

In life, I’ve failed many time times, and often, I never tried again.  Sometimes because I didn’t believe I could do it, others because I didn’t want to fail again.  Only rarely was it because I absolutely knew I couldn’t do it.  After all, I probably wouldn’t have tried it in the first place if I couldn’t ever do it.  It may be ok that I made those decisions at times, but I’m certain that it wasn’t always ok.  Where Rory has taught me that it’s really not ok, is when it’s something I dream to do.  And right now, my focus is not on whatever I did or didn’t do in the past, but rather what I dream to do today.

As you probably know if you’ve been reading Legally Fit, that dream is to run the New York City Marathon.  And as I’ve written about before, I’ve tried, and failed, at that dream before.  I even had to give up running, not because I was giving up my dream, but because the only way I could ever reach it was to first build the foundation that my body need to do it.  But the dream of running the marathon never stopped.  And that’s where the first part of Rory’s words to Poppy comes in.  When Rory said, “Never give up on your dreams.  Never, ever give up on your dreams,” he may have been speaking to Poppy, but the message spoke to me as I’m sure they did to so many others.

Over this past week, in working towards my dream, I’ve gone on runs of 11 miles and seven miles, and during each one, I got somewhat emotional.  No, not because Rory won the Masters.  But because when I do a long run, it takes me back to the days when a run like that would have made me have to stop running.  When my body didn’t have the foundation for it.  All in one moment, when I am otherwise zoned out and not thinking about anything else in the world while running, I do think about my failures, my dreams, and all that it has taken me to get here.  And “here” is only the point where Rory was these past 14 years – the point where I am working towards it and not giving up.