Run, Patti, Run-智慧背囊
At a young and tender age, Patti Wilson was told by her doctor that she wasan epileptic. Her father, Jim Wilson, is a morning jogger. One day she smiled
through her braces and said, "Daddy what I''d really love to do is run with you
every day, but I''m afraid I''ll have a seizure."
Her father told her, "If you do, I know how to handle it, so let''s start
running!"
That''s just what they did every day. It was a wonderful experience for
them to share and there were no seizures at all while she was running. After a
few weeks, she told her father, "Daddy, what I''d really love to do is break the
world''s long-distance running record for women."
Her father checked the Guiness Book of World Records and found that the
farthest any woman had run was 80 miles. As a freshman in high school, Patti
announced, "I''m going to run from Orange County up to San Francisco." (A
distance of 400 miles.) "As a sophomore," she went on, "I''m going to run to
Portland, Oregon." (Over 1500 miles.) "As a junior I''ll run to St. Louis."
(About 2000 miles) "As a senior I''ll run to the White House." (More than 3000
miles away.)
In view of her handicap, Patti was as ambitious as she was enthusiastic,
but she said she looked at the handicap of being an epileptic as simply "an
inconvenience." She focused not on what she had lost, but on what she had
left.
That year, she completed her run to San Francisco wearing a T-shirt that
read, "I Love Epileptics." Her dad ran every mile at her side, and her mom, a
nurse, followed in a motor home behind them in case anything went wrong.
In her sophomore year, Patti''s classmates got behind her. they built a
giant poster that read, "Run, Patti, Run!" (This has since become her motto and
the title of a book she has written.) On her second marathon, en route to
Portland, she fractured a bone in her foot. A doctor told her she had to stop
her run. He said, "I''ve got to put a cast on your ankle so that you don''t
sustain permanent damage."
"Doc, you don''t understand," she said. "This isn''t just a whim of mine,
it''s a magnificent obsession! I''m not just doing it for me, I''m doing it to
break the chains on the brains that limit so many others. Isn''t there a way I
can keep running?" He gave her one option. He could wrap it in adhesive instead
of putting it in a cast. He warned her that it would be incredibly painful, and
he told her, "It will blister." She told the doctor to wrap it up.
She finished the run to Portland, completing her last mile with the
governor of Oregon. You may have seen the headlines: "Super Runner, Patti Wilson
Ends Marathon For Epilepsy On Her 17th Birthday."
After four months of almost continuous running from West Coast to the East
Coast, Patti arrived in Washington and shook the hand of the President of United
States. She told him, "I wanted people to know that epileptics are normal human
beings with normal lives."
I told this story at one of my seminars not long ago, and afterward a big
teary-eyed man came up to me, stuck out his big meaty hand and said, "Mark, my
name is Jim Wilson. You were talking about my daughter, Patti." Because of her
noble efforts, he told me, enough money had been raised to open up 19
multi-million-dollar epileptic centers around the country.
If Patti Wilson can do so much with so little, what can you do to
outperform yourself in a state of total wellness?
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