Last place finishers, I am grateful for you. Not in the sense that as long as you are last, I am not, (although in my younger days, this was true) but rather in the sense that you are inspiring to me.
While a person can admire the elite athletes, with their sub-five minute miles, inhuman V02Max, cardio output and other bodily systems that basically blow the rest of us schlubs away, leaving us in the dust at worst or in the middle of the pack at best, I think it's the people who come in at the very end of the races that are most inspiring.
Elites have taken a natural talent and honed it, trained for it. They eat, sleep and breathe running and racing. The rest of us jog along in the middle, neither here nor there.
And then there's the last place finishers. The out of shape, the shy, the intimidated, the broken, the rebuilt or rebuilding. The people who take an hour or more to reach the finish line of what many of us think as an "quick and easy" distance of 5k.
Whenever I can, after finishing a race, I've stayed to watch the last place people cross the finish line and I've cheered for them. I've also talked to a few: the cancer survivor doing her first race since she had fought the disease. The morbidly obese man who decided enough was enough and began to turn his life around. He felt embarrassed to be seen in public but despite that and despite sideways glances and snarky comments, here he was. Those 3.1 miles probably felt like 3,000 to him. There was a lady who had a stroke who had to relearn everything, even how to walk. Another woman with MS, using arm braces. There they all were, rising to challenge in front of them, damning the torpedoes and everyone's opinions about what an runner/athlete is or is not. And at no point, no matter how scary, embarrassing or uncomfortable the race seemed to them, did they give up. How can someone not be inspired by that? To quote Lance Armstrong "Whatever your 100% is...give it." And they did. It's a humbling lesson in visceral fortitude, and I'm grateful for it.
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