Running In Place

Those who have been checking in on me for awhile are pretty much aware that I left my full-time job waaaaaaay back at the end of April and have been grooving on a summer vacation kind of thing nearly ever since. Doing a little per diem work for my old employer, doing a little bartending at my dad’s Legion, doing alot of porch sitting/blog reading/stupid Days of Our Lives watching. Well, evidently, summer is over. Evidently, the days of spending 2 or 3 hours in the AM drinking coffee and reading blogs are gone. Evidently, the days of having “Run” be the only thing on my schedule are gone. Also, it would appear, the late nights of beer, microwave popcorn, and Fear Factor are not only gone but had left a few errant pounds around the middle in their wake. The Summer of Sloth is. Evidently. Over.

In truth, I greet this with excitement and anticipation. When I left my job in the spring, I was toast. I felt brittle and dry and hollow. Since the age of 16, I had never NOT worked, so the notion of “taking some time off” was wildly exciting and full of possibility. I’ll travel, I’ll go hiking, I’ll do volunteer work, I’ll catch up on my reading, I’ll do all those things around the house that I never have time for. I’ll have all this time to be the person I always think I should be, if only I had the time. One of the social workers I worked with had listened kindly to all the things I was going to do with my time, and then said “don’t DO anything, just be there, on your porch, in your woods. Why do you have to DO anything?” That’s really about all I needed to hear. So the story of my summer is really encapsulated above - long coffee mornings, lazy afternoons, and hangin’ around evenings. My husband should get a superhero award for never, ever being the slightest bit perturbed (or at least showing it) when he would come home from a long day at work and I would not have gotten the mail (mailbox, 100 ft away), or washed the dishes (sink, about 12 ft away from my rocking chair on the porch), or was not even home but had left a note on the fridge that I was out with friends. Do I sound impossible to live with? I’m really not, I’m a total giver and all - but when I couldn’t be that for this little while, that guy was all about what I needed. The most tolerant being, ever.

So where am I? Oh, yes, summer’s over. And I feel like I’m SO back. I retreated, and I am refreshed. Presently, because of some positional changes at Hospice, I have been back to working nearly full-time hours to help them through the transitions. Next week, I begin ‘Train the Trainer’ sessions with our software provider so that I can assist in the roll out of our laptop ‘bedside computing’ component - which will be a long process of software building and training of some nurses who are veeeeeerry resistant to these new-fangled contraptions. Also, in mid-October, I will be starting my new job, the one in the acute cardiac care unit that I had my eye on all summer! This will be a huge departure from what I have been doing and they’re going to educate the crap out of me with critical care courses and advanced cardiac life support training. I am going to have some bizeee months coming up and I can’t wait! I’m sure that there are going to be times when I am totally exhausted and thinking to myself WHY? Why did I want to do all this?? But really, the thought of going from being so incredibly static to so wildly dynamic is pretty invigorating! Just to kick it off, I managed to get off my butt and lose the beer and popcorn gut in pretty short order and am at my lowest weight in about 5 years! Am I heading for the zone or what!

Here’s something else, and it’s not confirmed yet and probably won’t be for at least a few more days, but it is possible that I may be going down to Louisiana to do some volunteer work for a week or two! It’s been an interesting process to get to the point where I might be able to do what I have so much wanted to do since this all began. At first, I received many e-mails from various professional nursing organizations of which I am a member:

* Local Louisiana organization (communicating thru nat’l organization): please e-mail us if you’re interested - - thanks for your e-mail, the feds won’t let us into the shelters right now but we’ll keep you posted.
* New York State database: please register with us — thanks for registering, turns out the feds are not going to use state databases, please go and register with them
* Federal database: thanks for registering with us, the need will go on for a long time so please sit on your hands until we let you know we’re ready to do something, then maybe you can wait a little more.

So presently I may have an opportunity to go down with a team that will be giving support to “non-official” shelters that are housing more than 10,000 people at this time. It’s so hard waiting for the next e-mail to come. I just want to jump on a plane and go do something. Maybe I should rent a boat.

The bittersweet part of this potential opportunity will be shitcanning the 1/2 Marathon. At this point, I’m treating everything like it’s going to happen as planned until I hear otherwise and tapering per schedule. I will be sad if it’s necessary to abort the 1/2 but the desire to run it does not match the desire I have to go do this thing while I am able to.
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So what about actual running?? Well, last weekend was my last long run (and longest run yet) at 12 miles. I did the towpath thing again - started in the center and went back and forth in both directions so that I passed my car twice but only had to stop to re-supply once. What seemed to work well for me was Sunk!st fruit snacks and Gat0rade/water in about 1/2-n-1/2 mixture. A few fruit snacks at about 4 miles and 8 or 9 miles, plus swigs of my mixture about every 1.5 - 2 miles. It was a warm day but not particularly humid, I think there was a nice breeze. I ended up with a pace of 12:05/mile average (excluding 1 car stop and 1 portajohn stop) which was a little faster than I intended (was thinking more 12:30) but I never felt like I was running harder than I wanted to. Of course my legs were feeling it pretty hard by the end, but my cardio felt fine and untaxed. I was a little sore for a few days after, particularly in the hip joints (P.S. Got a left hip and pelvis x-ray to rule out degenerative joint disease. Consider it ruled out - yay!!!).

Another cool run this week involved a tempo run by choice and not just because I was not paying attention. The schedule said run 30 minutes, and I figured that was short enough to just go, so I did. It was humid so I felt like it was a bit of a struggle but I finished 3 miles in the 30 minutes, which is nearly 5K PR race pace for me. Maybe technically kind of too fast for what a tempo run should be (cause I still don’t totally get it all) but a good hard run that I really felt like doing at the time.
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One last thing. I already fessed up to Jon and the deceit of it all is nearly killing me. I totally fabricated the thing about putting peanut butter on the truffle. I have always been steadfastly honest in my blogging but this time I succumbed to the lure of dramatic intent, somehow inherently knowing that, if there was anything that would get a rise out of Jon, it would be the defacing of a truffle. The eating off the floor thing - true. The peanut butter - untrue. I do, after all, have standards.

So my conscience is clear, my hope is that I will be forgiven for my misleading, yet clever, hoax and I heretofore pledge honesty in all blog matters and never again to be seduced to go for the easy laugh (unless it might possibly provide the added humor of lovingly antagonizing Jon).