A Pair of Contradictory Thoughts

Learning from Eliud Kipchoge, Amelia Boone and Santa Claus (yes, really)

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Probably my all-time favorite movie is 1984’s The Natural, in which Robert Redford plays an aging Roy Hobbs, taking one last shot at major league baseball even though he’s well past the age at which most ballplayers retire.

I have no idea why it’s my favorite, especially because I was only 13 years old or so the first time I saw it. There’s something about Hobbs’s pursuit of what seems like a hopeless dream — inspiration mixed with melancholy and disappointment — that drew me in then and draws me in today.

Near the end of the movie, Hobbs is leading his New York Knights team in the World Series, but is hospitalized after going down swinging in the middle of a game with stabbing pains in his abdomen. If you’ve seen the movie, you remember why: the bullets from a gunshot wound he sustained from a “fan” decades earlier are still lodged there.

In the hospital, Glenn Close, who plays Iris (the love interest he left back in his hometown long ago) visits him in his room. Instead of being eager to get back on the field with his team, Redford’s Hobbs is despondent, as the time to reflect has reminded him of everything he missed from all the years he spent away from baseball.

Iris tries to cheer him up, but she sees the pain he’s in. And, almost under her breath, says this:

“You know, I believe we have two lives,” she says.

“How — what do you mean?” Hobbs asks.

Iris pauses for a moment, and then answers:

“The life we learn with… and the life we live with after that.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about regret lately — especially after last week’s post, and your reactions to it — as I’ve been continuing to make my way through Daniel Pink’s great book on the subject.

Since I wrote it and shared it with you, a pair of items have come across my news feed, both of which reflected back to me a lot of the thoughts I’ve been having, only in a different way.

The first was actually an interview from a few weeks ago, after the legendary Kenyan marathoner Eliud Kipchoge — who won the gold medal in the men’s marathon at both the 2016 and 2020 Olympics — faltered early on at this year’s Games in Paris, recording his first-ever DNF.

It was this exchange Kipchoge had with an interviewer that especially caught my eye:

“It is a difficult time for me,” he admitted after dropping out just after the 30km mark after an hour and about 40 seconds of running, with a discomfort around his waist.

"This is my worst marathon. I have never done a DNF (did not finish). That’s life. Like a boxer, I have been knocked down, I have won, I have come second, eighth, 10th, fifth — now I did not finish. That’s life."

On whether he would attempt another Olympic race at Los Angeles 2028, he said “you will see me in a different way, maybe giving people motivation, but I will not run."

"I don't know what next. I need to go back [home], sit down, try to figure my 21 years of running at high level. I need to evolve and feature in other things,” he added.

Kipchoge pointed out that he would continue to run marathons — he’s not leaving the sport entirely — but to me, to say what he said in an interview right after he experienced such a (for him) shocking early end to his run, says to me that maybe this is something that’s been on his mind for some time.

That maybe, at age 39, he knows his days of being the world’s greatest marathoner may soon be behind him — and that it’s time to evolve into the next phase of his life.

That’s not something that’s easy for me to do, so I can only imagine how hard it must be for someone like Kipchoge, who has ascended to a level in his sport that only icons like Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods have in theirs. It would be really hard to walk away from that, wouldn’t it? (Just ask Woods.)

That’s why, when I also came across Amelia Boone’s essay this week in her newsletter

Race Ipsa Loquitur

, titled “It’s a Pause, Not a Goodbye,” I found it profoundly moving. The 41-year-old runner is one of the world’s most accomplished obstacle race athletes, having won the Spartan and World’s Toughest Mudder races multiple times each.

A few years ago, however, she began a series of battles with both injuries and an eating disorder (which she has been courageously open and candid about), which have combined to keep her away from competing for long stretches of time. While she has been able to come back and race, she hasn’t been able to put together the kind of sustained effort needed to feel both healthy and energized to compete at the level she once reached.

Near the end of her post, she shared these thoughts, which I felt acknowledged the tension she must be experiencing, between feeling like being at 100% is just around the bend, yet knowing it could all come crashing down again:

“Running and race goals give me purpose and I find joy in the process of achieving them. The thought of not having one to focus my efforts leaves me feeling a bit untethered. I’m not sure what to do with myself without that structure, but my gut is telling me that I need to see what it’s like.

As much as I hate it, I’m taking this as a flashing neon sign that it’s time to let go for the time being. I’m not sure how long this pause will be, but I’m holding onto ‘maybe’ and leaning into the uncertainty the best I can.

The beauty of our sport is that it’ll always be there when I’m ready to come back to it. It hurts like hell to let it go, and I take comfort in the fact I know I’ll [be] out there again.”

As I read that, Boone isn’t yet ready to hang it up. She seems to believe there may still be better days out there on the race course for her, and for all I know she may be right! (Just a few years ago, Woods won the Masters in his mid-forties, the same year Kipchoge broke the two-hour barrier in the marathon.)

That’s the tension we all live with when we approach moments like this in our lives; we don’t really know if it’s time to move on and, as Kipchoge says, “evolve and feature in other things.” When there’s a judgement call to be made, we might be wrong.

And then there are other times when the choice is made for us, when life moves in ways that mean we can’t go back. We experienced one of those last night, when little T asked me if he could take a look at my cell phone.

I noticed he was scrolling back in the Messages app, looking at old texts.

“What are you looking for?” I asked, puzzled at what exactly he had in mind. And then he found what he was looking for.

“Okay, see this,” he said, bringing the phone over to me and showing me a text I’d sent to my wife, about a gift I’d bought our daughter last December. “Yeah, I remember that,” I replied.

“You said that was from Santa,” he said, looking me straight in the eye.

(As you might imagine, I felt a gulp creep up in my throat, as this was the conversation I knew was coming, but hoped never would.)

“Well…” I said, racking my brain for some answer that might shake him off. “I can’t remember, that might have been something I bought for her…”

He wasn’t convinced; we decided to come clean and tell him. The whole thing: Santa, the elves, the Easter bunny, everything. There were tears; he got choked up. Learning the truth about Santa is like finding out how your favorite magic trick actually works: you have an insatiable curiosity to know the truth, but when you find it out, you kinda wish you didn’t know.

Of course, this happens for children at many different ages; what it signals to me now, though, is that we’re moving from one stage of life with him into another — and, as much as I might like to stay back in the old stage when he was little, I can’t. Life is saying it’s time to evolve, to move into the next phase.

I find this really difficult! (My wife asked me last night, after we put T to bed, “I know it was hard for him — how are you handling it?”) I don’t want to move on, you know?

I know I have to, and I know I’ll get there. (Someday! 😃)

How do you handle these moments in life, when you have to choose whether it’s time to leave something important to you behind and move on? I’d love to hear from you — and, as always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell