A Runner In The Making

My dad sometimes says "Life's tough, and then you die." On separate occasions, mimicking a classic Monty Python sketch involving a nun, I've often heard him squeak, "I'm not dead yet!" By the transitive property (if a=b and b=c, then a=c), I think he's on to something.

And I wholeheartedly agree - life's tough, but I'm not dead yet! Sometimes to prove that to myself, I need to just run. When things don't seem like they'll ever go my way and I'm using all of my energy to just fake it till I make it, especially on the days I have my girls, sitting on my couch and making excuses to skip my run are usually pretty tempting. And I'm definitely one who has a hard time resisting temptation. My three year old, in particular, tends to use up quite a bit of my energy stores with her constant "testing" of her boundaries and my accompanying continuous efforts to think of ways to turn each toddler vs. mom scenario into a lesson. 

But today, my apartment seemed claustrophobic and I had a pressing need to get outside. I can usually talk myself out of a late afternoon or evening run with the stroller, since the smooth, steady motion tends to put to sleep the three-year-old who no longer naps. This is problematic if I care about getting her to sleep before midnight. Today I needed a change, though, and at 5pm she was still looking bright-eyed and bushy tailed. I was hopeful. To get her more excited about the run, I gave her the choice of leaving in ten minutes versus twenty minutes. She chose the latter, which gave me some extra time to get dressed and load up the stroller, so I asked her if she wanted to help me choose my running clothes. She was thrilled at the chance to help and chose my black workout pants and a pink tank top. (I couldn't have picked better, myself.) Finally, I asked her if she wanted to help load up the stroller and she jumped at the opportunity. We threw in her doll, a water bottle, my phone, and her baby sister, and were ready to head out. As a last minute thought, we decided to throw in the baby's new towel with a hood as I noticed the skies were turning a dark grey. 

The Run:

Length: 2.93 miles

Time: 30 minutes (32 minutes total with 2 minutes of stopping time to get something for a kid)

The route: 

We took a quick warm-up walk to the mailboxes to mail some thank you notes and bills. From there, it felt pretty easy to start up running. Usually I start my runs with the stroller somewhat slower, with a painful, choppy stride. My knees tend to hit the top of the back seat, so it usually takes some extra time to adjust and develop a gait that doesn't involve lifting my knees as high. 

Today was different. Today, with my iPod already playing at a low volume in just one ear, and both girls yammering away, starting up seemed smooth and effortless. While I don't think the baby has a preference as to speed, my older daughter always waits impatiently for me to pick up the pace and start running. Today was no different and she let out a loud "Yay!! Are you running?" as I loped forward. I warned her that today might just be a slow and steady day. Of course she asked Why (as most three-year-olds do at every available opportunity) and I told her that today was just going to be a relaxed run. She seemed to be ok with that answer, so we moved along without any expectations. 

I ran a modified version of the "run around the block" I usually follow if I have the stroller, or when I'm on my own and I can't muster up the creativity to plan a new route. This route usually traces the main roads near my apartment complex. We basically follow a big box and each time we make a turn, it usually marks a mile.  Tonight, the sun wasn't quite close to setting, so I decided to take a bit of a shortcut along the Spring Creek Trail. I ran the "run around the block" a couple nights ago and I needed a change of scene. The run remained fairly uneventful and I just kept pushing slowly along, allowing myself to take the pace down a notch if I started to get a bit more winded than I wanted to. The time flew by as I listened comfortably to a relaxed playlist and did my best to answer all of the questions that flowed from the tiny voice in the front seat of the stroller. 

Is it my turn, yet?

When I felt I had run a solid 3 miles or 30 minutes (I can rarely tell which one I hit first), I stopped the stroller and asked the munchkin if she wanted to get out and go on her own run. Of course she did. At this point, we were about a half mile away from home, and she took off running ahead of the stroller. I expected her to slow down or to stop and want to walk before we hit the crosswalk to cross the street to home. But she didn't slow down and rather than walking to cool down, I ended up throwing in a few more minutes of jogging, albeit it pretty slow jogging. She lately has to always be in front of me, regardless of whether or not we're walking or playing or jogging down the path next to our apartment, and I usually tell her that she's welcome to be ahead me as long as she's quick enough to hold me off. Tonight, I let her keep her lead and she squealed with giggles every time she heard the strolling getting a bit too close.As she awkwardly mimicked an endurance running, with arms and legs not quite in sync and elbows flailing, she called back to me to tell me she had her [imaginary] iPod in and she just got to a great song. I couldn't help but chuckle, until she started singing along to an imaginary song that she was making up as she ran, at which point I burst into laughter. Finally, after holding my hand across the cross walk, she slowed to a walk just before the path that leads to our door. She claimed it was time to walk because she was at the end of her run. It was just too much for me to handle and I immediately gushed that I just loved her. I got a non-chalant "Yeah." 

Finally at our door, I bent down to start rooting for keys. When my daughter proudly exclaimed "I had a great run! I did a great job!" I realized that this is the reason I need to get up and go. This is the reason I take them with me. The two little people who stared up at me as I unlocked the door are the very reason I need to keep "faking it till I make it" on some days. And getting in my run, any kind of run, is the best way to do that. 

Passing People in the Dark

Running in the dark:

I've decided that the best way to train during the summer in Colorado is to go for a run just after the sun sets. Not dusk, but about a half hour after dusk, where you can immediately slip on the cloak of darkness as soon as you slink beyond the scope of the porch light. It's cooler then, less muggy, and any audience is most likely blinded by the dark. I actually get pretty nervous running in the dark, mostly because I live alone and don't want to slip away into the night without someone noticing my absence until the next morning. So, on the evenings I choose to workout after sunset, I tell a friend my self-imposed curfew, where I plan to go, I grab my phone, and then run like a bat out of hell to stay one step ahead of the Bogey Man. Despite the threat of said Bogey Man, it turns out there's actually a significant population of runners who prefer to squeeze their miles in just before they slip in to bed. 

Most of these fellow PM runners don't get the heebie jeebies from any number of strangely shaped shadows the way I do, which is probably why summer is actually my favorite running season. On a night run, when I come up behind someone lumbering along comfortably and probably relishing in the availability of significantly cooler temperatures, I breathe a barely audible "Excuse me: on your left," and then whiz by. Not only do I scare the bejeezus out of that runner as I effortlessly skirt around them (I bet you didn't know how many ways there are to jump when you're startled!), but then I quickly piss them off as they realize they just got passed ... by a girl! 

Tonight's Run: 

The above description was tonight's run in a nutshell. I needed to get in some movement after an entire day spent in my apartment, working on home projects and applying to several jobs online. I didn't spend much time with other people today and I didn't have my girls tonight. Needless to say, I needed to remind myself that there were real human beings outside the plain walls of my little apartment. As I ran tonight, I felt quick and comfortable, and I surprised myself by effortlessly passing each runner that shared my nighttime running venue. When I hit the end of the route I had dictated to a friend after only 25 minutes, I decided that I was satisfied with the run, and so let myself slow to a peppy walk. As I strolled home, another runner - a woman - zipped by me and propelled herself effortlessly up the tiny hill I was using as a cool down. 

Who is my real running competition?

As soon as I was passed, my competitive self launched into a rant about how I was just as fit as the woman disappearing ahead of me; I was just taking an easy day and maybe she was just starting her run. I heard the little voice in my head begin to make a laundry list of excuses or comparisons.

And suddenly, it hit me: Why am I trying to be anything but what I can be right now? 

Cue parallel analysis to the rest of my existence. Sometimes I can't stand when my brain needs to scrutinize, probe, and dissect every detail of my current reality to make any sense of it. I'm pretty sure this is a subconscious attempt at making some sort of momentous revelation so I can hurry up and figure out the moral to be learned and move on already. In the last couple of weeks, my conscious mind has made it especially clear that it won't rest until any emotional pain has been properly turned into a handy piece of knowledge. And there's a lot of emotional pain right now. So when the automatic response to watching another runner pass me turned into even more internal analysis, I started to shut down. But then came my "Aha moment" (the above question about being the me I can be), which abruptly sorted every strain of analysis into nice, neat little compartments. And the internal interpretation stopped. 

It sounds totally cheesy, but the revelation was so simple and so suddenly clear, it was as though the clouds (or stars, in this case) had parted and a ginormous hand had reached down to pass me the memo I'd been missing. My lesson to be learned seemed to be this: There's no reason to hang on to what used to be, because those moments will never again happen in exactly the same way. Duh, I'm pretty sure I actually knew that. But I suppose that when it comes to letting go, we're pre-programmed to want to project the same happiness or victory into any future moments that originally helped to define certain moments from our past. There comes a point in every run, every race, every situation, and every relationship where we have to accept that change is inevitable and a part of the process. We change physically, our strategies change, our appreciation for different parts of the experience change, and we become different individuals in the process. Rather than doing everything we can to hold on to the exact details of how it used to be in order to replicate that same chain of scenarios and the same accompanying feelings, I'm convinced we can make a conscious decision.  We can look back with recognition and a smile, or we can take the necessary lesson associated with the experience and store that feeling and memory away in a vault, along with other pieces of the past.  

Grief is good, but it's a process: You can't be a high school runner forever!

There is certainly a grieving process involved in letting things go and in allowing the possibility of future outcomes that, at one point, seemed improbable or maybe even impossible. And part of that grieving process includes complete denial and a stubborn refusal to accept any forward movement, away from the era that has just ended. I'm no exception to this. I'm currently smack dab in the middle of the stubborn denial stage in a handful of areas of my life and am comfortable that I'm sitting stubbornly in that stage. It's part of the process, right? It's definitely a confusing and mentally challenging stage to be in. I keep trying to imagine futures that exactly replicate the very thing that I know is over. But I know that I can't live in this stage and that I won't stay here forever. Change will find me, even as I try to run away as fast as I can and hide among the dark shadows after dusk. 

Back to the woman who passed me up the hill: Good for her. Hopefully she felt as energized and spritely as I did at the beginning of my run. I don't have to be better than she is, nor do I have to be far ahead of the curve in cross country running as I was in high school, where I could pass competitors left and right, and then run for hours more. And I'm certainly not "out of shape" now just because my knees might get a bit more tender after a run, or an hour run seems like the endurance event of the century, or a marathon was biting off more than I could chew. It's just that it's not the same "shape." 

But why be anything other than the runner I am right now? Moving on, or just letting something be a memory rather than a hope for the future, doesn't mean completely giving up on the possibility of finding bits and pieces of those memories in slightly rearranged scenarios and outcomes.

And so it goes with everything else in my life. I can cry because something's over, or because its rare to be able to avoid the pain that comes with accepting the present moment rather than letting go of what could have been. Or I can even pout because someone else might still see the memory and see anything else as failure. But I'll probably still whiz by people through the summer darkness and when I'm done, I can smile in recognition as I cheer for the ones who pass me. 

Go Go Gadget Legs!

My legs felt like they were filled with lead today. So did my heart ... maybe they were just acting like mirror images of each other. I had an easy-paced song playing on repeat on my iPod, so that helped get me through the first 18 minutes. But as I got closer to my stopping point, it got harder to breathe and harder to push my legs forward. "Go Go Gadget Legs!" was the thought that kept coming into my head.

I finally turned off the busy street that I was on and into a neighborhood. Three houses down the block, I jogged up to the door, grabbed the bike propped on the front porch, and was off - back toward home.

I think I probably biked about 15 minutes, swerving and zooming around cars and down the bike lane. My quads were screaming at me to change gears, but the burn in my legs was nothing compared to the sting I couldn't shake from not having knocked on the door to say Hi. I could have kept riding, but too much time alone means too much emotional analysis and processing, so I decided to stop.

Today was the second day in a row of running. I can't say I'm necessarily back on track, but it feels good to have gotten out and burned some nervous anxiety. Maybe this way I'll be able to fall asleep before my insomnia kicks in.

And on a different note: today was my first brick workout (triathlon term for a workout with a bike ride, followed by a run). My workout was a reverse brick, so I'm not sure if it counts, but it was definitely nice to switch it up!

Find A Penny, Pick It Up ... And Then Grab A Heiny!

It's Hot! But hot is nothing compared to ...
If you're lucky enough to get yourself out the door on a hellaciously hot day, like today, it must mean something to run by an entire dollar bill! Hopefully I'll have great week ... considering this last week has been pretty painful. Maybe painful isn't quite the right word. Maybe "out of sorts" is better. Or even "numb," and "shocking," more properly fit the way I've barely propelled myself through most of this week in zombie form.

What came first ... the motivation or the run?
My mental state certainly contributes to my motivation in getting out the door for a run sufficient enough to add to my training log. The whole running thing seems lately like another item at the very bottom of my "To Do" list; an item that rarely gets crossed off that same list. I had to explain to my mother today that focusing on my own sanity during a divorce, while looking for a job, and then desperately attempting to build my network of friendly support in a new-ish town, definitely trumps watching the news or even keeping up with the public opinion around certain Supreme Court Justice nominees. I'm pretty sure running contributes to that sanity I crave ... and I can hardly squeeze that in these days. (So don't ask me to participate on any political panels on current, or somewhat current, events!)

So, over this past week of chaos, stress, and unexpected emotion, my mental state has been stuck trying to analyze and sort and compartmentalize every detail, while simultaneously trying to let through only the necessary number of tears needed to process those details. Needless to say, the energy that might get sent to my muscles, my lungs, or the connections between my brain and my legs during anything resembling a run, has been redirected. There's nothing left.


The things that threw me out of whack both took place on Tuesday. Today is Saturday. Today, after spending most of my energy trying to fake "normal" for my visiting mother and for my kids, I forced my shoes onto my feet and my body out the door.

The Run
It's hot as hell, so I wasn't expecting to go far. In fact, I almost started sobbing with the first step. But with each subsequent step, my breath came back and my lungs took over. My iPod is full of newly added music to push me through my attempt and I actually surprised myself by running for a full 20 minutes before taking a quick 2 minute walking break. The cloud cover helped with the blazing sun factor, so I was able to push through a total of about 40 minutes and even had a smile on my face before I walked back through the front door.

And on top of it, I found a dollar! I must be rich in luck! I think I'll save that very dollar to buy my next lotto ticket. Or maybe I'll just keep it stashed in my water bottle as my own personal good luck charm.

And if I have trouble finding my motivation for sticking to training in the future, my mother suggested that I attempt future runs with a Heineken in hand. I could drink away my sorrows while getting my run crossed off my list. Why didn't I think of this before??

How Long is a Marathon, Anyway?

When I mention to non-runners that I am in training for a marathon, I get a mix of responses. 
Some are encouraging: Wow, good for you! and That seems like it would take some serious commitment! What an inspiration! Others are annoyed or incredulous, as though extreme fitness and endurance is a serious lapse in judgement, or even a sin: You're nuts/crazy/insane!  or That's disgusting ... who in their right mind would want to put themselves through that?? But my favorite responses are: Oh wow, that sounds like quite the challenge! ... How long is a marathon again?


As a "runner," I have known for as long as I can remember that a full marathon is 26.2 miles, while a half-marathon is, logically, half of 26.2 (thus 13.1 miles).  Now that I have one marathon under my belt, I still remember how each chunk of miles felt and how excruciating it was to push through those last six to ten. I can also clearly recall how exhilarating it was to cross the finish line in one piece, trying to comprehend the distance I had just managed to cover. (I immediately burst into tears the moment I saw the finish tape.) So when I have to fill people in as to the distance I plan to race, it makes me feel that much cooler to throw out a number that could be up to ten times longer than the average Joe might attempt at any given time.

But over these past two months, as I tried to diligently put in the training miles, and then record the numbers into my training log, I would automatically take the time to relate my success or my failure of that day's run to whatever else was going on in my life. I am a self-described "over-analyzer" and I can't just turn off the relating and the analyzing. It just happens until all of my thoughts are compartmentalized into nice little boxes.

Finally, a couple weeks ago, there was just too much analysis and too much thinking going on. There's too much that can't be put into nice neat little boxes in my head. Although running, and exercise in general, is supposed to help alleviate stress and get the endorphins pumping, my marathon training turned into just one more stressor on my plate full of things that have been keeping me awake at night and things that cause sudden panic attacks, where it gets hard to catch a full breath. I didn't want to think about everything that I have to battle on a daily basis anymore. And that meant I didn't want to take any time during the day where it was just me and myself: "So, Hills, what's new?" No thanks.

So, in order to stop thinking and stop panicking, I stopped running.

In the last two weeks, I've run once. It was a night run, with my Mr. Wonderful and his dog, and we pushed each other only as fast as we could keep a somewhat easy stride with each other. We did a short 2.5 mile loop around the neighborhood and high-fived at the end. For that run, I didn't think about anything else but getting to be next to him and making sure I didn't run onto the furry feet of our four-legged running buddy.

Otherwise, I have been very hesitant to slip on my tenny-runners and turn on my iPod. It just seems like more work than it's worth. But I know that's not going to help quiet the analysis and eventually I'm going to have to face the ingrained need to compartmentalize the daily chaos and the turmoil that fills my consciousness. Eventually, it'll probably all come shooting back at me, like a shaken soda bottle, and rather than just be tired or annoyed with having to "think" about it, I'll be totally overwhelmed!

So, against my brain's desperate pleas to find something "more productive" to do, I'm going to inch back into this whole running thing with a yoga class. I'll have to quiet my mind and allow any discomfort into my head for an entire hour! And then maybe tomorrow, I might actually take the stroller for a spin.

I just need to keep reminding myself that, even if I don't actually race the entire physical distance I originally set out to do, I'm certainly still in training for a marathon. But my marathon isn't based on 26.2 miles, it's based on enduring my divorce, and on living through the "terrible threes" that seem to have suddenly consumed my angelic baby girl, and on surviving everything else in between that seems to take more energy than I have to give. There's no finish line in sight, but I know that I can keep plugging and keep pushing and I will make it through this in one piece.