medals | Keeping up with the Walkers…

Trying to decide which medals to hang up on my medal hanger was difficult! I was amazed at the number of medals that I had accumulated since I started running. After every race, I chuck them into a shoe box and kinda forget about it. But sorting through the medals made me realize a few things.

I’ve run ~~a shitload~~ loads of races
Some races mean a lot to me and I treasure those memories more than others
I’ve come along way as a runner

My medal hanger from some of my favourite races

My medals from some of my favourite races!

We get so caught up in the goals, so focused on what’s next and the training that we forget the journey we’ve been on. Every runner started as a beginner. For majority of us, 5km was a huge milestone. Now, we push on to get PB’s for half marathons, 42kms and even ultra’s.

I hung up my favourite medals with a huge sense of pride and became quite nostalgic about certain favourite (and not so favourite) races. I remember the races where I rejoiced and felt good and those which made me cry and hate running.

I recall my first 10km race where I managed to come in under 80 minutes and the Johnson Crane half marathon where I hit my first (and hopefully last) wall. The races I’ve hated and then fallen in love with again, such as the dreadful (but now my favourite) Deloitte, and Two Oceans – my schizo’ mix of fun runs and serious 21.1kms. When the selected medals were all hung up, I felt really good, incredibly proud of myself. We don’t get many opportunities in life to feel that way lately.

My friend Pamela custom makes these medal hangers with whatever quote or title you want. I wish she could make me one with the title “Bron’s life” and I could see everything displayed up on the wall. All my goals accomplished, the lessons in life that I’ve learnt, the different experiences which have made me grow and become the person I am today. Oh wait… actually, nothing does that better than running and I’ve got the medals to prove it.

Sometimes in life, you need to see it to believe it!

In case you want your own hanger, go check out these links:

SA Medal Hangers on Facebook

SA Medal Hangers website

I wanted to give KK something special for his Comrades race, something meaningful. But he’s not the soft, fluffy teddy emotional kinda guy. A rather introverted engineer, he’s not into deep quotes. He’d rather watch cat videos on YouTube than a motivational TED video and Hallmark cards aren’t his thing.

His face went blank when I even suggested that we watch Chariots of Fire together the week before Comrades, so I really was torn as to how I showed him my support & that he knew I understood the significance of his race and what it meant to him.

I knew he wanted his back to back Comrades medal more than anything. This is a medal only given out to those who run the Up run and return the next year to run the Down run (or vice versa). It wasn’t even about beating his previous time. All he spoke about was these two medals and ensuring he finished in time because this would be his only opportunity to get it.

So the night before the race, I packed two coins into a tiny plastic bag which I gave to him to run with. The two coins symbolized his two medals and I told him that each & every time he felt like quitting or when it got tough out there along the route, that he should reach into his running belt and feel the two coins. Feel and envisage what he was running for.

KK finished his race and got his medals! He didn’t say whether or not the coins helped but I did notice that he never threw them aside. When we packed up to go home, I caught a glimpse of the coins, still in the packet, tucked away neatly with the rest of his running kit. That said it all…