Those who know me know that running became one of my least favorite things to do. I love working out and doing all the active things, but truly running is one of the things I dread the most at this point in my life.
 
Well I simply don’t run for fun, but I will run if I have to. What are the times I run if I have to? If I missed the gym several times in a week, if my friends are waiting for me, if I’m running late somewhere, or if we forget the laptop with our presentation for class.
 
Yes that happened. For one of my classes we had to create a three-hour lecture/workshop for our classmates with a topic we believed we needed to know and it was not part of our curriculum. We decided to speak about conflict management in higher education settings, which is a topic all four of us love. Simple as that. My roommate, two other classmates, and myself worked on this assignment for a few weeks and the night before we did a run through of everything. At this point in life, it is very common for us to save our files in an online drive that we can all reach. Well we did that, but our presentation had many videos that made our file quite large and not suitable for e-mail or a drive. Anyways. As we were in the classroom preparing for our presentation, maybe about 30 minutes before class started, a moment of realization hit. The laptop was in our house.
 
[Cue horror music]
 
It took my roommate and me a few minutes to figure this out. One of us had to go home and grab the laptop because even when we had a version of our presentation in our e-mails it was not what we intended to present. Well I volunteered as tribute. It made sense. My portion of the workshop did not start until later and my roommate was doing all the introductions. So I quickly grabbed my stuff and I started running to my car (which is about .8 mile distance). So if you saw a person furiously running through main campus in a business casual outfit… that was me. That was me two times because I also ran back.
 
I was late to class about 7 minutes. Which is not terribly bad, we had an activity planned that would take the first 10 minutes of the presentation. It all worked out. We worked out the conflict that arose from our conflict presentation. Sweaty, smelly, with blisters, and shin splints, but it all worked out. We BTHO one of our final projects and we delivered a good quality three hour presentation.
 
This whole blog is not about me complaining I ran for the laptop since now it is pretty funny. Yes, I had shin splints, but I always get them when I run, which is why I hate running. But point being is that I may not want to be your couch to 5K partner, or run a marathon with you, or even go for a small jog with you. I will encourage you to do it and I will say “good for you, keep going” from wherever I am.
 
I don’t like running, but I will run for you. I will run if I have to meet you on the other side of campus, I will run if I’m late somewhere, I will run if I need to save our butts from a poor grade, and I will run if you simply need me (if it’s urgent, you know?).

Mara Schaffler | Educational Administration and Human Resources Development

Mara Schaffler is a second year in the Student Affairs Administration in Higher Education (SAAHE) program within the College of Education and Human Development.