for everything there is a time ...

'But like of each thing that in season grows'
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

For everything there is a time - it gives life depth and vibrance. But sometimes, just sometimes, we wish it were time again for the 'other time'. Learning to live in and for the moment is not always perhaps the way we want.

15 days ago I woke to the mountains, to a beautiful clear mountain sky, and to the company of friends. Instead of where I had planned to be - waking to an apprehensive breakfast before the 100km World Championships. Learning again to take the time for a while, not to run and not to plan too far ahead.

Walking these days in a winter landscape - how the seasons turn - I have trod this one path in all seasons this year - the cool of early dawn on a summer morning, drenched by pouring rain, the smells of summer, the heat of the sun, then the intensity of autumn colours shocking the senses, and now to this world of white.

A training run that in summer days is just an easy hour or two, clad in shorts and t-shirt .... becomes a day's occupation, with icy feet and the air cold on your face.

Life is an intensity of emotion and experience.

There is always a time to be happy and a time to be sad. A time to move fast, a time to slow down. A time for cold and a time for warmth. A time to have company and a time to be alone. Chaos or peace; silence or noise; beauty or ugliness; to be in haste or to be at rest; to feast or to fast; to have plenty or to do without. For everything there is an opposite. That is nature. But sometimes, just sometimes, we wish it were time again for the 'other'.

Disappointment and hope ...

"We must accept finite disappointment, but never loose infinite hope."
MARTIN LUTHER KING

Stars in a mountain sky after a beautiful autumn day in Austria.
I'm here and not on route to Italy as planned.

This week I had to make the tough decision to withdraw from the 100km World Championships on Saturday. I say tough - well - the decision sort of made itself. Initially I thought it was just knee pain and hoped that the physio and a few days rest would allow it to settle. But now it is not isolated to the knee, I'm unable to run without pain - and I'm concerned as to what the injury is. With a Gold Medal in 2006 I've had my own hopes and expectations to live with during my training and preparations. Now those hopes and expectations are meaningless. I can’t run. After all the training it seems almost unbelievable to be injured at the last minute. There is nothing I can do. But it doesn’t make it any easier. The feeling that not competing I let down the team, Great Britain … and myself.

It is perhaps inevitable that the words competition and performance are in use at a Sales Meeting - and I'm here in Austria at the autumn sales meeting of The North Face. In a way, with a long summer of races behind me, these are words I have been living.

But we live in an uncertain world. And beyond competition and performance we have to dream. We have to endure and we have to explore. We have to learn to live with it when sometimes, just sometimes, that exploration takes us to an edge we didn’t want to find.

I might be facing uncertainty now, but there are stars in a clear mountain sky. And I dream.