#ATaleOfTwoMarathons

Where to start?  I’ve been in the office a week now, diving into marathon number one: the marathon of meeting as many colleagues as I can.  I’ve had the opportunity to meet so many fantastic people already, through coffee, lunch, after work borrels, and even working through some security issues which have arisen.  (Hey, work happens, right?  It is why I’m here, after all).

The home office is a great place to be.  There are so many interesting people from all over the company (AAM, AGT, Corporate Center, and NL) converging in one place, and I’m doing my best to meet them all in two short months.  In fact, on the train to work this morning, I actually introduced one of my Corporate Center colleagues to an AAM colleague.  It truly is a small world.

And then this week there was the real marathon.  For those of you who didn’t know, I was lucky enough to run the Amsterdam marathon on Sunday.  By the way, I’ll warn you right now, this part of the blog will most likely get a bit long (and crazy runner guy-ish), so if running isn’t your thing, you may just want to jump to the end of the blog right now.  It’s okay, I won’t judge.

Still with me, faithful readers?  Cool.  In a word, the Amsterdam marathon was amazing.  As a person who loves running as much as he loves language and culture, it made for the perfect day.  I met and ran with people from over 50 countries.  Talk about a small world.  It took me over 5 hours to complete, so I had *plenty* of time to meet people.

I ran with all kinds of people: a couple from Belgium working for NATO, a huge group of hilarious Russians, an awesome guy from Ireland, tons of fantastic Dutch people (of course), two ladies from Scotland (who were highly impressed that I knew so much about their wonderful country thanks to all of our awesome colleagues in Edinburgh), a teacher from France, an Italian who worked for Mizuno (one of the marathon sponsors), and a Finnish man celebrating his 75^th birthday by running his 25^th marathon with his family.  Wow, what an inspiration.  I only hope I’m still running at his age.

So even though I ran the marathon by myself, I certainly wasn’t lonely.  After all, I had 14,000 friends to make.  Plus there was the incredible scenery.  We started and finished in the Olympic Stadium.  The.  Olympic.  Stadium.  At 4km, we ran through the beautiful Rijksmuseum.  Kilometers 14-25 were along the Amstel Canal, complete with quaint farms, lots of boats, men wearing jetpacks, and of course the windmills!  (You know I stopped to take a marathon windmill selfie!)  And since this was the 40^th anniversary of the marathon, there was music at nearly every other kilometer.  All in all, it was just mindblowing!

But… I’m trying to keep this blog as honest as possible, so it’s confession time.  Truth be told, as far as the run itself, it wasn’t my greatest.  My legs started cramping at the halfway mark, so I had to run/walk the last 22k (13 miles).  It was hard.  Ridiculously hard.  Your mind can really mess with you if you allow it.  There are a million reasons to stop, but only one reason to keep going.  However, just because I had a difficult run doesn’t mean I couldn’t still make it an amazing experience.  Running the Amsterdam marathon was truly a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I wasn’t about to waste it.

I find life (and work) are a lot like marathoning.  Sometimes you have great days, and sometimes you have not so great days.  But you look for the good things, you work hard, and you keep going.  Sometimes you need to ask for help.  Sometimes help is already there, and you just need to accept it.  And sometimes, you just need a little pep talk.  That’s why I love this video by Kid President.  If you haven’t seen it, take the three minutes out of your life.  You’ll be glad you did.  Because we all need a reminder sometimes that we were made to be AWESOME.

What will you do to make the world more awesome?

And yes, rest assured that I’ll probably sign up for another marathon.  At least once my poor legs are back to normal.  Who knows, maybe I’ll be running one on my 75^th birthday!