Kevin's Blog - "You Get What You Need"

I‘ve always thought that it was sort of a cheap gimmick to use song lyrics as the basis for a piece of writing.  The literary snob in me thought it was an easy way to let someone else do the heavy lifting on the prose and to give the appearance of deep though and reflection by quoting the words of a familiar song.  But on my last long run before the race this weekend, I realized how wrong I was.  Sometimes, a song inspires you and verbalizes your feelings better than you ever could and is an absolutely perfect fit.  As I was halfway through an out and back course on an overcast and windy Sunday afternoon, I was starting to grumble a little bit and wonder what I had gotten myself into for this Saturday morning.  I was making excuses in my head about why I hadn’t trained enough and why I had not lost as many pounds as I had hoped.  Just then, my iPod shuffled to the most perfect song for my situation.  I heard Mick Jagger’s voice on the classic Stones’ song, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”.  Why was this the perfect song?  The chorus sums it: ‘No, you can't always get what you want, But if you try sometime, you just might find, You get what you need’.  That’s me in a nutshell.  I find myself thinking that my running will give me the things I want, that it will make me look like one of the cover models on the Runners’ World magazine or that I will turn into some amazingly fast runner in my age group.  These things are probably not going to happen.  However, running does give me what I need.  It gives me a reason to stay active and to take better care of myself.  It gives me measurable goals and sense of community with other runners.  And when I cross that finish line and I get that finisher’s medal, it will give me something else… the satisfaction of completing a challenging distance.  As I often told my kids during their cross country season, if running was easy, everyone would do it.  I may not wow anyone with my time, but I will still be proud of my accomplishment and will look forward to doing it again in the spring.