courage means what?

Before last night’s track workout I was certainly feeling the past 18 days of training. Coach doesn’t tell us the workout until after we have warmed up so we were taking bets on what it would be during warm-up. I thought it would be k’s (at 10k pace). Others bet on 400s and 800s. We were all wrong.

The workout was supposed to be 4X400+ 3X1mile at faster than 5k pace. It just didn’t seem possible, considering the extreme fatigue in my legs, the heat on the track, and (mostly) the fear in my brain. And so I got to thinking about courage, and what it meant to win a mental battle, and how my Dad used to tell us that the Tough get going when the going gets tough. And that sort of helped. But not enough.

But then I remembered something else I had read in To Kill a Mockingbird about courage.  In the novel, there is this mean old lady who always yells at Scout and Jem for no good reason. But then she dies, and it is revealed that Mrs. Dubose was so mean because as her health deteriorated she refused to take medicine that would numb the pain. She wanted to die, not beholden to nothing or nobody.

And in her death Atticus teaches his children a lesson. He says this: “Courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.  You rarely win, but sometimes you do.” Atticus teaches his children that courage is when you start, even when you know you can’t finish.

So it was those words about starting something, even knowing that I couldn’t finish it, that helped a lot. And even though Coach modified the miles to 1200s, the whole squad still saw it through. And even if it was a small kind of victory, it was still a victory.

And for that, we learned about courage.