What I Thought About As I Ran.

I thought about my great personal sufferings in the distant 

past and how, as energy travels in waves, they reach and
shape the present.

I thought about the middle and high school PE classes where
I lagged behind everybody for a 50m, 100m or 200m dash,
a 400m loop, a double-loop, or, God Forbid, a 1000m
endurance run.

More to the point, it was almost always a boys-only run. The 
girls would get the easy way out (it seemed easy, anyway) and 
they would get together and watch the race. The girls that I tried
to impress. They looked as if saying: "Dude, you who fall behind
every other boy. None of us would want you. In this game as well
as in life, the fittest survive. You are out of the gene pool."

The ones with the lowest self-esteem in math classes would 
outrun me with such ease and glee, as if they were doing it
for revenge. Friends would pass with a smile and maybe a
brief encouragement. There were pity but no salvation: I always
finished the last. Looking back, I don't remember a DNF or do-not-finish in distance running lingo. Yes, I always sufferred to the end.

The despair and torture would pass, body recover but humiliation stay. For days the
voice in my head would keep telling me that I was the weakest
fatass in the whole school and probably the whole world and I
would walk with my head hung in shame. And then, just as
the painful memory started to fade, there came another PE
class to refresh.

Nowadays, instead of feeling avenged myself, I looked back 
in awe as I undertood that some of the things I did and was
doing could be explained. Why I believe in "柔弱胜刚强." Why I often side with the losers in games. Why I later embrace running. Etc. Etc.

Hallelujah!

[7grizzly]

回复 '暖冬cool夏' 的评论 : Thanks for your kind words. I tried to imitate Garrison Keillor's humor in that paragraph. Being called an "IT elite" makes me very happy although you seemed to have set the bar too low ;-)

[暖冬cool夏]

The girls that I tried to impress.

Those short-sighted girls must have been regretful, had they known that you are such a runner now and that you are a Silicon Valley IT elite:))
We are all shaped by our past, and grow as we move forward.