“Being from Ecuador, I was probably one of the few, out of 20,000 runners at the starting line of the Boston Marathon, who wasn’t worried about the heat, but when I sat down on the tarmac to wait for the start, I had to stop. immediately because I burned my butt ”. Thus began an article I wrote on Facebook more than 15 years ago. Someone read it (Ann) and gave it much more importance than I could have imagined; He asked my permission to post it on his blog, and I said yes. And in 2013, in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, I wrote something else about that race. And again, someone gave it more importance than he could have imagined. They have my review posted on their website and they named me ambassador for Boston Log (a domain that publishes stories of those who have run that race).
But the first time someone was interested in what I had written, and published it, Ann (wherever you are, thank you) said something that confirmed to me what life had taught me for a long time. He said that all runners should read my article, even if the Boston Marathon “was not in their cards.”
“What is in the cards” refers to what we are capable of doing or achieving. After all, whether we like it or not, life gives us a hand, with which we have to play, and in those cards the potential is defined, and also the impossible.
Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, received the news that his pancreatic cancer (diagnosed a year earlier) was terminal. And in September 2007 he presented his “last lecture” (also known as “the last lesson”) at that university: “Really reaching your childhood dreams”. Later this conference would become an autobiographical book that became a ‘bestseller’. He died the following year, at 47.
From there a phrase is born that has to do with all this. Pausch said: “we cannot change the cards that were dealt to us, only the way we play the game.” Which implies that to get the best out of something, it is not worth wasting time reacting to life situations over which you have no control (the cards dealt) but rather focusing your energy and discipline on developing possible solutions to handle such situations.
But those cards that are dealt to us, we do not see them all from the beginning, or – embarked and focused on the journey that we believe is our life – we do not pay much attention to them. Until I started running, more than 20 years ago, I had no idea that in my letters it was to be able to run a marathon in almost 3 hours; What’s more, later I understood that they were even running it in less than 3 hours, but I couldn’t, and, at my age, that letter has already expired. Nor did I know that there was another one that would allow me to run 160 km races; I saw that at 50.
We also receive specific letters for specific situations, which are those related to certain moments or stages of life (those were mine about my life as a runner).
This is not poker … you can’t wait for two more aces, trading 3 cards, if you already have a pair. Those are your cards; what matters is the way you play the game.
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