Are you in San Francisco on the 30th and 31st of July? You should come out and visit Polar Vision while we run the San Francisco marathon!
I’ll be manning the marathon’s charity booth on the 30th of July from 2-3 PM. The expo is located at the East Concourse at the SF Design Center, 620 7th Street, San Francisco, CA.
I ran the SF marathon back in 2009, and the expo is always a lot of fun. Over 50,000 people are expected to attend, there are great deals on fitness apparel and all the major California races for the rest of the year come out and offer registration bargains. I’ll be at a table with some of the other charities partnering with the marathon. There’ll be a prize wheel and everything. It should be a lot of fun! Other info about the expo can be found here: http://www.thesfmarathon.com/the-race/the-sf-marathon-expo-race/
I found this cool website called Athlinks. It pulls all your historical race information and aggregates it in one location. My race info is here:http://www.athlinks.com/racer/93482345/Andrew-Jensen.aspx. A few races are missing, but this indicates that I’ve run over 600 miles in organized races over the last few years. Still, this is somehow the first marathon I’ve run specifically for charity.
How did that happen? Why didn’t I ever run for a cause? My excuse was probably always that I was too busy. Being in the military is a time consuming occupation- especially one as frequently deployed as ours is right now.
But what about after I got out? One thing I’ve seen returned combat veterans struggle with is a sense of purpose in their lives. A lot of people I know lost good friends… they leave the military and the question is, what next? They have a lot more in common with the general population than they realize… Meaning and life purpose is something everyone has to confront eventually
I’ve seen people take three paths. The first is outright cynicism. They figure that because they had a negative experience with their military adventures, no cause is worth joining. They think they can focus on only themselves, and invisible market forces will take care of the problems in the world.
The second path is the flavor of the moment. People get passionately caught up in whatever is currently catching their eye, and they love talking about it length to whoever is around. This path has a lot of benefits… people can think you’re really involved, that you really care, that you’re making a difference. Meanwhile, followers of this path are always the junior people in whatever cause they’re promoting and don’t feel like they’re compelled to really offer some substantive support.
Finally, there are those who are really identifying what’s important to them and working on it gradually over time. If this story is ‘The Three Little Pigs,’ then the people on the first path are wolves, the people on the second path are building houses out of the straw, and the people on the third path are building houses out of bricks. This path means recognizes that accomplishing something worthwhile takes a lot more time and effort than anyone could initially be comfortable with. It means making long term connections with people and struggling towards a goal together. It means making some day to day changes in our lives.
I hope I’m on that third path. And I hope you’ll join me. And I hope to see you at the convention center on the 30th, and at race day on the 31stwhen I’ll run for Polar Vision. You’ll be able to spot me because I’ll be the large sweating man with a ridiculous expression on his face (too much concentration on my pacing… not enough mental cells left over to monitor all of the rest of that).
Thanks!
-Andrew