Nowhere to hide

One of the fascinating aspects of running for me is that there is absolutely no room whatsoever for bullshit, ego and self-delusion. Unlike life, it's impossible to hide from the truth. You either did the miles you set yourself to do, or you didn't. No grey areas. It's impossible to delude yourself about your capabilities half way through a ten mile run on a cold night with miles to go and every fibre of your body hurting: you either stop, or you carry on. No gray areas.
Humility also comes quick. It's strangely vivifying to be overtaken during what you think is a decent paced run by a vastly overweight 50 year old, a skinny little rake of a 17 year old girl or a 6ft 4" monster bloke with the most horrendous running gait - and I've been overtaken by all of these and more. You just learn to live with yourself and your abilities, and you get a little closer to being happy in your skin, accepting your limits.
And what I'm finding out about myself is interesting to me. My mind and as a result my body have evolved a lot in only a few months of comparitively hard running. When I first set out on this whole running thing a couple of years ago, I struggled to continue moving forward after just a few minutes, the urge to stop almost over-powering. Chest thumping, legs shaking, sweat blinding me. By mentally forcing myself to keep going, my body has apparently learned over time that putting up huge resistance is futile. So now it doesn't complain nearly so much and is learning to work with me rather than against me. Or at least that's how it feels.
In fact, having done a 10 mile run on two separate occcasions within a few days this week, at no point did I feel under pressure to simply stop.The massive, almost irrestistible urge to just stop running I once felt no longer crops up. Now I can feel tired (and frequently do), listless sometimes and just plain beat up now and again but I experience very little mental or physical pressure to stop.
It's an odd thing to almost stand back and objectively watch my body deal with the increasingly strenous demands I'm making on it - and see it take them all in its stride, quite literally. My resting heart rate is lower, the time it takes my heart to recover after a run is shortening rapidly, I'm running longer, faster and more comfortably and I no longer get sore knees or hips, even after long runs. (Well, sometimes my knees get a bit creaky after a very long run but only for half an hour.)
I have a new found respect for this remarkable little body we all have.