Leaving Defeat Behind

I am a lawyer.

A month or so ago I lost a major lawsuit.  We worked for several years on this case. If you’ve ever litigated you know that you put your heart, soul and ego on the line when you walk into a court room. Losing is breathtakingly devastating. You never get used to it. Lawyers rarely believe that their clients are wrong. Lawyers are far less cynical than the public gives credit.  They actually want justice to prevail. But often times it does not.

I am also a runner.

Running, as many of us have learned the hard way, doesn’t solve problems. That you can’t run away from your problems is a true “truism”. Sure you can analyze problems, get creative, come up with great ideas and solutions while on a run; maybe you can even escape from them, forget it all for a while out on the trail - breathing hard, scrambling up the mountain in the cool air, smelling of fall.  But there is a difference between escaping, running away from and leaving behind.

Until the problem is solved, for better or worse, there is no running from it. But sometimes when my problem is resolved; I cling to it - especially, if the resolution was not what I wanted. We cling to it as if there was something more we could do or could have done. The bitterness of defeat in this lawsuit was very heavy and I clung to it very tightly, ruminated on it and wanted a “do-over.” 

Defeat. Bitterness. These things can burden us and in the long run hurt us in ways hard to heal. You can’t solve defeat.  You can only set it down and leave it behind.  Move on. Oh, sure, learn from your mistakes and grow from your loss if possible and all that. Although in my view the conventional wisdom is wrong, defeat often holds few lessons, and if there are any they can be learned without carrying around the defeat like a talisman – as if one defeat could ward off another.

A week after my defeat, it had become a burden that was not teaching me anything and was hurting me. It needed to be dropped somewhere, left behind, as far from me as possible.  So I did something relatively foolish physically, but maybe smart mentally, I went out and ran on the hardest trail I knew in the area. An eight mile loop called “Too Long Trail” that should really be called “Too Long and Steep Trail”.  It gains about 1,000 feet in elevation in far too short a distance – maybe three or four of those eight miles – and it starts at about 7500’. 

It was a trail that I had no business running on a Tuesday night in October as the sun set and temperatures dropped. Flashlight in hand, I went out and purposely ran that thing as hard as I possibly could with the goal of leaving my defeat behind. So hard that I stopped to catch my breath more than once, held my chest to see if it was going to explode and my stomach to see if I was going to puke.

And somewhere on that run, maybe at one of those “rest stops”, that defeat got left like a rock kicked to the side of the trail.  It’s probably a dull red and slightly warm to the touch. The recent snows probably melted right off it. But I’ll never see it again. It’s gone. It wasn’t until close to the end of the run that I realized it was gone when I was suddenly running smooth. Dancing down the trail with gravity.

I can’t run from my problems, but once the “worst” has come to pass, once the problem is an outcome and not a possibility, I’ve discovered that running helps me learn what I can and leave the rest behind.

Because unlike a dog that loves you and finds its way home again, defeat follows you home only if you carry it. I finished that run with a much lighter load than I started - carrying just a few empty Roctane® packets.

And a smile.

_________________________________

Thanks for reading.