Dirty Harry was a bad bad man....

.....someone may wonder how can Dirty Harry and running have so much in common, but my obtuse mind works wonders when I am actually back and running. Now don’t me wrong I love the Dirty Harry movies. This is one of those times. In the various Dirty Harry movies he was always a guy who bucked the rules and system and ignored what ohers told him . He also had some of the best quote from his ‘Do I feel lucky’ punk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daFb3J-cwLg&feature=related) to ‘Make my day’ (,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6-Snl4a1RI) .

The quote I want to focus on is his also famous, but one the character of Harry Callahan often contradicted in his actions, was ‘A man’s got to know his limitations’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZNlraF0xec). If anything I’ve come to realize as I got older was that one of the reasons I never stopped running was that I refused to set limits on what I was doing and what society said I should be doing. There was always that little thing in me that said you can somehow learn something from this situation. I think that’s what Brett Favre is going through in his various comebacks... he simply likes what he is doing.

It’s not that I expected to go out and win every race or set world records (to the contrary), but I always recognized that pushing limits and boundaries was something that really motivated me. So if that meant trying to run competitively at an age when most people have given up or coming back from an injury or simply seeing what sort of stresses I could put my body through then that was something that I saw as a challenge.

I was lucky in that even in the bad times I always was able to have some performance that kept me going and trying. It was then that the decision of what I was doing never really became a question. It had already been answered.

I can look back on things in 20/20 hindsight realized that some of my performances in my 30’s were a direct result of ignoring Dirty Harry’s famous words. If I had listened to him there is little doubt that I would not have achieved any tangible results or made any teams. But more relevant is that I would have lost out on so many great experiences. From such things as travelling, learning from winning/losing/trying/giving up, making friends and mostly the day to day enjoyment of grinding it out I learned many things about myself that I would have never found out if I had packed it in.

I remember a story from a few years back when Bob Kennedy was trying to overcome injuries and race successfully over 10km. He was being advised by famed miler Marcus O’Sullivan who told him to try and comeback because he had also done the same thing in his mid 30s and that it was during this time that he appreciated running and more importantly had learned the most about the sport and himself.

There are times when packing it in becomes a lifestyle choice or something that you forced into, but if you create those ‘limitations’ then remember that sometimes you may lose something that you can never get back. So don't listen to Dirty harry....instead do as he did and buck the system. You just might surprise yourself.