Little Dude and Little Dud

I excel at stopping. When I run, I have no qualms with slowing down, taking a break, even fully stopping for a mid-run stretch session. I love it when that blinky red palm tells me to halt at a crosswalk. But this love of stopping has led to bad running habits.

When I feel that urge to stop, I envision a little dud version of myself plopping itself down in my lower back, setting up camp, and settling in like a rock in a hammock. Little Dud drags me down. On my ten-miler yesterday, I was determined to knock Little Dud out of the hammock.

Instead of Little Dud, I need Little Dude. Little Dude is crowded up against the front of my chest, bouncing like a spring, Tae Bo punching the air like a little maniac. Little Dude's got spunk! I can feel that energy in my chest, driving me forward. When I picture Little Dude's relentless momentum, I'm less inclined to give in to the desire to stop. Little Dude's got the stopping qualms I need to develop.

Little Dude kept me running in miles 7-9 when Little Dud usually convinces me to walk. Unfortunately, at mile ten my hip, knee, and ankle started to hurt, and while Little Dude is pretty magical, her analgesic powers are limited. I walked most of that final mile. But I completed ten miles yesterday, when what I really wanted to do was sit next to the fire, eat Christmas candy, and read my book.

Thanks, Little Dude!

Straight Up Tale of Woe, Yo

Let's start with the disingenuous sunny side of the whole debacle:
- I completed my 7th full marathon!
- I didn't give up, even through the heat of Honolulu, blister, chafing and plantar fasciitis!
- What an accomplishment!
- Wow wow wow!
- Happy happy happy!
- Positive positive positive!

That's enough.

Crossing the finish line this year, I felt the least proud I have ever felt at the end of a race. There was no reason to imagine it was going to end well, considering I'd only trained up to ten miles. And yet, at the starting line, under the dark, humid skies of Honolulu, surrounded by tens of thousands of athletes, I couldn't help fantasizing about finish line triumph.

There were a few good moments. Miles 1-10 were pretty fantastic, actually. But a few miles later the walking started, and before long it transitioned into limping, with some mild whimpering to accompany the sound of my dragging feet. And it wouldn't be a marathon without my customary emotional breakdown around mile 25, when I start thinking about all of the people who love me in this world, and then I start to cry a little, and then it gets hard to breathe because crying takes too much oxygen. Thankfully, my go-to mantra, "Buck up, Princess," is the world's most effective method of shutting down hyper-emotionalism and getting back to business.

This marathon was a slap of necessary, but kind of mean honesty. Girl, you suck at this right now. And you're going to keep sucking at this if you don't actually run. You have no business imagining you're going to do well just because you're super good at positive visualization. 

Thanks, marathon. And so the real triumph is not the marathon I did last weekend, but the fact that I packed my gym bag, left it in my car, and headed straight to the gym after school on Tuesday, instead of taking the 4-20 weeks of "rest" that I usually take around the holidays.

I'm signed up for a half marathon on New Year's Eve. I'm in training.

Honolulu Marathon, 2015

Reverberating Miracle Pudding

When I run, I bear a striking resemblance to a reverberating pudding. I possess a thick, wobbling heft that religiously obeys the bounciest laws of physics with each weighty stride. Most of the time, I feel bad about this. I have visions of a younger self, slimmer, with less percussive footfalls. I have fantasies of a future self, so lean and bendy that when people see me, visions of gazelles involuntarily prance through their heads. Past and future look so good! The present is just depressing.

Part of making sustainable changes means doing some hard re-thinking work. I need to re-think what I can realistically achieve in my future. I need to re-think how I view myself in the present. Stopping myself mid-wallow and re-directing my thoughts toward a positive, productive place is impossible most of the time. But every once in a while, I can do it.

It's unrealistic to become a lithe piece of jerky any time soon; but, I feel like I am well on my way to achieving the status of flan -- still in the pudding genre, but more solid, requiring a firmer shake to elicit a wobble.

From pudding to flan! And why not dream big? Maybe within a year ... mochi status! (Still a bit of squish, but damn tasty.)

I may be a pudding in the present, but I'm a pudding that is running a marathon in four days. That's amazing! How many puddings can do that? I'm like some sort of miracle pudding! Woo!

Self Pity Stew

This has been my week:

Not a shred of stupid optimism, annoying positive attitude, or grating self-motivated pep to be found. And not a hint of training. There was some guilt at first, but by midweek, I had moved beyond feeling bad about not doing anything that even remotely resembled training. I sank nice and heavy into a sticky stew of cold-hearted self pity generously garnished with apathy. And then I floated around in it, relished it, let it seep between my toes, gargled its cloying juices, rubbed it into my face.

I wallowed.

It felt like something in me had completely shut off. Instead of a burning drive to reach a big goal, all I had was a burning drive to eat fries and watch Jessica Jones whose nihilistic world view spoke to me.

My weak little plan was to start fresh on The Weekend. The Weekend is a magical place where everything is possible, where the week's sins are forgiven, and rebirth can be achieved. I didn't do anything this week. It's okay! I'll just jumpstart myself on The Weekend, and launch a whole new life! Reality has yet to bear this out. Reality is so lame.

Thankfully, my dad texted me on Friday night: "Run tmrw?" It was the external force I needed. Without that external force, I would have planned on doing a training run, slept in late on Saturday morning,  eaten a leisurely breakfast, read my book for a while, done some mindless internet browsing, watched some Jessica Jones, read some more, eaten lunch, realized it was late enough in the afternoon that I would be running in the dark, and excused myself from running on the grounds of personal safety. Maybe next weekend.

With Dad, it's up and out by 8am. (He wanted 7:30, I negotiated half an hour, which resulted in us still being out running while it rained its hardest the last half hour of our run. Sorry, Dad.)

Much to my delight, and despite not training for a week, I have not lost every strand of muscle fiber in my legs and gained 150 pounds. My bad mind was wrong. It was a great 10-miler. We ran it in the same time that I ran 8 miles last weekend. It made me feel like a runner again.

I have no idea how to not wallow this week. I have no idea how to carry the good juju from this run beyond The Weekend. But right now, I feel worthy of the moniker "Runner," so I'm going to mentally tattoo that identity to my soul, maybe write it in Sharpie on my hand, and do my best to be the thing I am.

Embrace the Hard

The thing I'm noticing about long distance running (and perhaps aging ties into this as well) is that the point at which I feel warmed up seems to be getting farther and farther from the point at which I start running. This is especially unfortunate when I feel warmed up at around the three mile mark of a 3.5 mile run. Most of my runs at the gym feel unfortunate.

There is, of course, the option to continue running after that three mile mark, but running much more than three miles on a treadmill makes me hyperaware that I am on a machine in order to simulate running, that I'm paying for the privilege to fake run, that my life is overly dependent on computers and machinery to help me function, that even my most basic human connections are mediated by technology, that I don't remember the last time I had a real conversation on the telephone instead of texting or emailing the people I love the most in this world, that our capacity to connect, empathize, and love is rapidly diminishing in this digital era, and that we run the risk of losing what makes us human for the sake of entertainment, convenience, and commerce.

Running is enough work on its own, I can't have an existential crisis every time I step onto the treadmill. Five miles is my absolute limit. Beyond that, I need the outdoors and proximity to the universe to give my mind room for vast expansion.

While running on the treadmill on Monday, well before slipping into the comfortable warmed-up zone, I thought about how much I wished this were easier. My left shin and ankle felt tight, like running with a plaster cast from foot to knee, my heel hurt, and both legs felt tired and wimpy. Not doing this was a lot more appealing than doing this. After a few minutes of wallowing, however, a rather radical thought dawned on me: I don't actually wish this were easier.

I mean, yes, of course it would be quite nice to be able to run ten miles at a seven minute pace and barely break a sweat. But really, no matter where I am in my fitness and training, I'm not actually looking to do something easy. I've set a huge goal for myself because I want to do something hard. I sign up for marathons because they are much more of a challenge than 5Ks at this point in my running life. Shifting from lusting after easy, to relishing the hard gives hard a purpose beyond just tormenting me. Hard is getting me somewhere. Embrace the hard! Hard is what I want!

This new (and unfortunately worded) mantra propelled me through the rest of the run and I finished my 4.2 miles feeling optimistic. (Or, maybe I was just finally warmed up.) 

Sour Grape Legs

There's a story I want to tell about myself as a runner. And I want the story to be true, so I have to run the narrative I want to tell. The drive to tell a certain story motivated me this week.

The week began with the banshee wailing in my ear. How do I do this when I often get home from work at 8pm, eat dinner at 8:30, and go to bed at 9:30? Is it okay to not do anything? Every time I don't do something, does that negate the something I did the day before? How do I to this when at the end of the day, my body feels like a wadded up paper ball that some sweaty-palmed middle schooler has been throwing at a wall all day?

On Wednesday I came home while it was still light and hurried back out the door to get my body moving before my brain had a chance to realize what was happening. It felt really good for the first ten steps. And then my legs went acid on me. My muscles felt like someone had strung every sinew with sour grapes - like if you bit into my legs the tartness would go straight to that spot just under the back of your jawbone. (Well, no. At first you'd have to bite through a layer of fat, and as we know, fat is flavor, so for the first bite or two I'm not sour, I'm absolutely delicious. And then sour.)

It was a pretty terrible run. The walking part went well, though, and over half of it was walking, so overall, it was kind of great?

I ran again today after school, which makes three runs in the past week. That's the beginning of a good story.

Stacking the Deck

After publicly stating that I'm going to run, it seemed pretty important that I actually do so. And so I stacked the deck in my favor this morning.

1) I wore my running clothes to my National Boards Certification meeting and told my fellow candidates that I'm running a marathon in December. (And by running, I mean confidently striding for the first 10 miles, then walking since I'm approximately 4 months behind on my training for this one.) Looking like a runner and talking like a runner made me feel very runnerly. It was nice. When the meeting was over, I was ready to run.

Due to the success of this strategy, I may have to reconsider my powerful belief that leggings are not, in fact, trousers, and should not be worn in public for non-exercise related activities, like attending National Boards meetings.

2) I did not go home after my meeting. I love home. It's cozy, warm, relaxing, and the perfect place to settle in and not go running. Transitioning from home to running feels impossible most days. I regularly tell myself I'm going to change into running clothes real quick, and then go for a run first thing when I get home from school. It's happened one time since school started in September. Once I'm in the door I deflate like a saggy old balloon. Saggy old balloons do not like to run. They like to drape themselves over sofas and watch Dr. Who.

So, instead of going home today, I went straight to the gym. And I ran!

That's it. I have to remember how simple this can be. Get dressed. Don't go home. Go run.

These are my legs

This is what my legs look like. They're a robust blend of Okinawan and German stock. They're the descendants of pioneer ladies and laboring immigrants. I owe a great deal to these weighty stems. They carry me across finish lines, lead me through the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, wander the streets of India, pedal across the United States, and support me every day as I stand in front of a public school classroom. They're good legs!

Lately, these good legs have been the unfortunate recipients of neglect. As another year of teaching 8th grade settles over me, running is the first thing to get pushed out of my schedule. Intellectually I know the very best thing after a long, wretched day at school is a run outside in the wooded park near my house. Unfortunately, I am an intellectual void at the end of these types of days, and instead of thinking with my head, I feel with my stomach.

The struggle to choose the long-term joy of healthy over the immediacy and comfort of unhealthy is a specter lingering at my side. There are stretches of time where it floats on the periphery of my life, a mostly-forgotten ghost. But it never fails to return, not content to merely haunt, but manifest itself in the form of a tireless banshee. 

I'm going to run tomorrow (even though I really don't want to, and there's an epic storm forecast for the morning, and my shoes are not that good, and I haven't run in over 4 weeks).

It's time to shush the banshee.